## 5 Concluding Remarks: Discussion and Outlook  
This paper has attempted to build an ontological representation of the process of defining the AA of an MMP, based on the interpretation of the technical implementation into the praxis of legislative and normative acts and documents. The ontology can be useful for at least two reasons. First, this approach provides all the participants involved in the AA process (be they institutions, organizations or private citizens) with a better understanding of the domain of interest [47], through an iterative learning process that can continually be refined; this learning process is, in principle, inclusive, because the construction of the glossary can be improved by integrating the definition of concepts, relations and descriptive attributes, here carried out solely on the basis of documentary sources in a participative way, by including, for instance, experts in the domains of ecology, botany, zoology, planning and environmental assessment, or representatives of the public administrations involved. Such a collective conceptualization of the domain would also greatly improve the chances of sharing and reusing the ontology in the domain field. Second, since the ontology here proposed is a domain ontology, therefore aimed at structuring, representing and communicating knowledge on a specific area of interest irrespective of potential applications, the ontology of the AA of MMPs can be updated, refined and reused in the given domain [27], and it can lay the bases for the development of task-dependent or application-oriented ontologies in the same domain, for instance focusing on administrative and procedural tasks. Table 3 shows the main pros and cons of the ontological approach we propose in this paper. Third, the ontology defined so far is designed with the general objective to make it easier and more effective to implement AA procedures, since it makes available a conceptual framework that allows planners and public officials to identify their roles and functions in the procedure development in a pretty straightforward way. For example, let us consider one of the central issues of the AA of an MMP, that is the question of the assessment of historic and cultural heritage. If we look at Figure 3, we can identify the instances of the subclass \"Historic and cultural components\" (notation \"Hist_and_cult_comp\") under class \"Phenomena,\" namely, \"Potentiality of conservation and protection of the historical heritage,\" \"Potentiality of sustainable use of the historic heritage,\" \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l l} \hline \hline
**Pros** & **Cons** \\ \hline Better understanding of the domain through an iterative & The ontology can be exported only to countries where the AA \\ learning process that can continually be refined. & procedure is in place. \\ \hline Inclusiveness of different and often non-consistent & Exportability is constrained by differences in the institutional \\ disciplinary and scientific perspectives through the & spatial and regional planning frameworks to which the \\ participation of the experts in the involved domains or of & ontology relates. \\ key stakeholders. & \\ \hline Sharing and reusing opportunities in the given domain. & Issues of semantics owing to different institutional contexts. \\ \hline Possibility of continuous refinement and updating. & Issues of semantics due to the translation of the glossary. \\ \hline Exportability in the domain under the given conditions. & Lack of mandatory character, which means that there is a \\ need for the establishment of a formal, regulatory framework. \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: The pros and cons of the ontological approach in planning processes. AA, appropriate assessment.