Geography
“In this paper, we have presented some reasons why
ontologies for geographic objects will differ from the ontologies of everyday
objects commonly examined by philosophers and cognitive scientists. For one
thing, topology and part-whole relations appear to be much more important in the
geographic domain. Research on this topic must be careful to distinguish the
domain of the real world from the domain of computational and mathematical
representations, and both of these from the cognitive domain of reasoning,
language, and human action. Human practice is an important part of the total
ontology. Cultural differences in categorizations are more likely to be found
for geographic entities than for objects at table-top scales. Geographic
ontologies are more strongly focused on boundaries, and a typology of boundaries
is critical. Work involving formal comparisons of geospatial and cartographic
data standards and dictionary definitions in a variety of languages will provide
an important starting point for the cross-cultural experiments with human
subjects that will be needed to refine the details of the ultimate ontology of
geographic kinds.” (Smith & Mark, 1998)
Literature:
Holt-Jensen, A. (1999).Geography - History and Concepts : A
Student's Guide. 3rd Ed. Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications
Smith, B., & Mark, D. M. (1998 in press) Ontology and
geographic kinds. Proceedings, International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling,
Vancouver, Canada. 12-15 July.
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000300/00/ontology.html
Raper, J. F. (2000) Multidimensional geographic information science. London, Taylor and Francis.
Birger Hjørland
Last edited: 10-03-2007