Geographical categories: an ontological investigation

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to establish how non-expert subjects conceptualize geospatial phenomena. Subjects were asked to give examples of geographical categories in response to a series of diOE erently phrased elicitations. The results yield an ontology of geographical categories-a catalogue of the prime geospatial concepts and categories shared in common by human subjects independently of their exposure to scienti c geography. When combined with nouns such as feature and object, the adjective geographic elicited almost exclusively elements of the physical environment of geographical scale or size, such as mountain, lake, and river. The phrase things that could be portrayed on a map, on the other hand, produced many geographical scale artefacts (roads, cities, etc.) and at objects (states, countries, etc.), as well as some physical feature types. These data reveal considerable mismatch as between the meanings assigned to the terms 'geography' and 'geographic' by scienti c geographers and by ordinary subjects, so that scienti c geographers are not in fact studying geographical phenomena as such phenomena are conceptualized by na¨ve subjects. The data suggest, rather, a special role in determining the subject-matter of scienti c geography for the concept of what can be portrayed on a map. This work has implications for work on usability and interoperability in geographical information science, and it throws light also on subtle and hitherto unexplored ways in which ontological terms such as 'object', 'entity', and 'feature' interact with geographical concepts.

Conceptualising the geographic world: the dimensions of negotiation in crowdsourced cartography

“…As Smith and Mark (2001) put it, the traditional philosophical area of ontology 'seeks to study in a rational, neutral way all of the various types of entities and to establish how they hang together to form a single whole ('reality') ' (p. 592). In this sense, the age-old e↵ort of ontology can be seen as a systematic work of analysis and clarification of the internal structure of the entities that tacitly populate human cognition and language.…”

“…In the philosophical sense, these new mapping practices attract attention in human geography and critical GIS for their collective, transient, and mutable nature (Schuurman 2006, Warf and Sui 2010, Elwood et al 2012, Leszczynski and Wilson 2013, Gerlach 2014, Perkins 2014. On the other hand, geographic information science (GIScience) has been engaging in formal ontology in the tradition of analytic philosophy and knowledge engineering, aiming at clarifying formally the logical constructs used to encode geographic information (Smith and Mark 2001, 2003, Kuhn 2003, Janowicz et al 2013. As these two approaches are grounded in divergent intellectual frameworks and goals, in this study we adopt the GIScientific approach, without engaging directly in the rich debates in geography.…”

Ontology-Based Geospatial Data Query and Integration

“…Difference in semantics used in different data sources is one of the major problems in spatial data sharing and data interoperability [6,16]. One possible approach to overcome the problem of semantic heterogeneity is by means of ontology [18,31,32]. Cruz et.…”

Describing the Where – Improving Image Annotation and Search through Geography

“…The matrix suggests a variety of ways in which images might be queried or indexed. For example, CBIR techniques capable of face recognition [26] might allow us to annotate the "specific of/ who" element (a picture of Jim), whilst CBIR techniques capable of face spotting [30] would allow annotation of the "generic of/ who" element (a picture of some people). Moreover, the matrix also suggests how proxy data might be profitably be used to help us describe images -for instance use of a time-stamp and location associated with an image and a local almanac would allow generation of annotation related to the "generic of/ when" (a picture at night).…”