An Ontology for Grounding Vague Geographic Terms

Many geographic terms, such as “river” and “lake”, are vague, with no clear boundaries of application. In particular, the spatial extent of such features is often vaguely carved out of a continuously varying observable domain. We present a means of defining vague terms using standpoint semantics, a refinement of the philosophical idea of supervaluation semantics. Such definitions can be grounded in actual data by geometric analysis and segmentation of the data set. The issues raised by this process with regard to the nature of boundaries and domains of logical quantification are discussed. We describe a prototype implementation of a system capable of segmenting attributed polygon data into geographically significant regions and evaluating queries involving vague geographic feature terms

Geospatial Semantics

Geospatial semantics is a broad field that involves a variety of research areas. The term semantics refers to the meaning of things, and is in contrast with the term syntactics. Accordingly, studies on geospatial semantics usually focus on understanding the meaning of geographic entities as well as their counterparts in the cognitive and digital world, such as cognitive geographic concepts and digital gazetteers. Geospatial semantics can also facilitate the design of geographic information systems (GIS) by enhancing the interoperability of distributed systems and developing more intelligent interfaces for user interactions. During the past years, a lot of research has been conducted, approaching geospatial semantics from different perspectives, using a variety of methods, and targeting different problems. Meanwhile, the arrival of big geo data, especially the large amount of unstructured text data on the Web, and the fast development of natural language processing methods enable new research directions in geospatial semantics. This chapter, therefore, provides a systematic review on the existing geospatial semantic research. Six major research areas are identified and discussed, including semantic interoperability, digital gazetteers, geographic information retrieval, geospatial Semantic Web, place semantics, and cognitive geographic concepts.Comment: Yingjie Hu (2017). Geospatial Semantics. In Bo Huang, Thomas J. Cova, and Ming-Hsiang Tsou et al. (Eds): Comprehensive Geographic Information Systems, Elsevier. Oxford, U

Architecture for a grounded ontology of geographic information

A major problem with encoding an ontology of geographic information in a formal language is how to cope with the issues of vagueness, ambiguity and multiple, possibly conflicting, perspectives on the same concepts. We present a means of structuring such an ontology which allows these issues to be handled in a controlled and principled manner, with reference to an example ontology of the domain of naive hydrography, and discuss some of the issues which arise when grounding such a theory in real data — that is to say, when relating qualitative geographic description to quantitative geographic data