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A Geographical Taxonomy for Geo-ontologies

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Abstract

This article intends to provide an overview on the philosophical and geographical background of geo-ontologies and to propose a geographical classification of these ontologies, in response to their increasing diffusion within the contemporary debate. Accordingly, the first two paragraphs are devoted to offer a short introduction to the ontological turn in philosophy and to the development of the ontology of geography, that is that part of the (philosophical) ontology mainly focused on geographic entities and their boundaries, spatial representation, meretopological relations and location. As a second step, this preliminary analysis is taken to be a helpful device in showing some philosophical tools useful for geo-ontologies and in determining whether and what geographical sub-areas can be identified from non-professional geographers. Consequently, paragraphs three and four investigate the emerging of geo-ontologies from the spatial turn and their general aims. Part of this inquiry is dedicated to show some taxonomies derived from the domain of computer and information science and to underline the absence of a classification suitable for spreading geo-ontologies in the geographical debate. As it is, the fifth paragraph is concerned with a taxonomy for geo-ontologies grounded on some fundamental geographical distinctions. The basic idea is that such a taxonomy might best introduce geo-ontologies to the geographical debate that, in turn, might deeply influence the advancement of these ontologies in terms of conceptualizations and trace gradually the guidelines for a classification, in which the development of geo-ontologies would follow all the different sub-disciplines within the same geography.

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Notes

  1. «The Semantic Web can be seen as an evolution of the WWW in which machines can “understand” the meaning of the information and services available on it. This goal is enabled by the usage of languages and technologies that support a description of Web resources in terms of concepts and relations they refer to» (Goy and Magro 2015, p. 7463).

  2. In this context, the term "reality" is used in a broad sense, which includes, for example, physical entities, counterfactual ones, imaginary entities, and so forth (Goy and Magro 2015, p. 7457).

  3. Computer scientists do not actually agree on the meaning of “ontology”. Indeed, in the literature different definitions of the term can be found. See for example: Neches et al. (1991), Gruber (1993), Guarino and Giaretta (1995), Bernaras et al. (1996), Borst (1997), Swartout et al. (1997), Guarino (1998), Studer et al. (1998), Uschold and Jasper (1999), Fikes and Farquhar (1999), Sowa (2000), Smith and Mark (2001), Mentzas (2002), Noy and McGuinness (2003), Smith (2004) and Jaziri and Gargouri (2010).

  4. For an analysis of the proliferation of ontological research in the analytic area, see Martin and Heil (1999). For a classification of the contemporary (philosophical) ontologies, see Runggaldier and Kanzian (1998), D'Agostini (2002) and Varzi (2005).

  5. Cfr. Ferraris (2008).

  6. See also: Smith and Varzi (2000) and Galton (2003).

  7. Moreover, we can also conceive objects and events in terms of predicates assigned to corresponding spatial regions.

  8. See also Simons (1987), Smith and Mark (1998), Casati and Varzi (1999) and Mark et al. (1999).

  9. See also Smith (1994, 1995, 1996).

  10. For an analysis of the connection between mereology and topology and of the notion of mereotopology, see Smith (1995). For an analysis of the relation between the notions of topology and border, see Casati et al. (1998), Smith and Varzi (2000) and Varzi (2007).

  11. Cfr. Berners-Lee et al. (2001).

  12. Cfr. Khun (2005).

  13. About this fast-moving field, see Turner (2006), Goodchild (2007), Boll (2008) and Hudson-Smith and Crooks (2008).

  14. Cfr. Mark (1993), Frank (1997), Smith and Mark (1998), Bittner and Winter (1999), Rodríguez et al. (1999), Bishr and Kuhn (2000), Câmara et al. (2000), Frank (2001), Kuhn (2001), Rodrìguez and Egenhofer (2004), Visser (2004), Kavouras et al. (2005), Janowicz (2006), Euzenat and Shvaiko (2007) and Buccella et al. (2008).

  15. Cfr. Abdelmoty et al. (2005), Ressler et al. (2010), Battle and Kolas (2012), Perry and Herring (2012) and Kyzirakos et al. (2014).

  16. Ontology reuse can be defined as the process in which existing ontological knowledge is used as input to generate new ontologies. It can contribute to a mutual understanding between different communities, and to interoperability, integration and aggregation of data and information (Pâslaru-Bontaş 2007, pp. 41–42).

  17. The study of the ways non-experts conceptualize given domains of reality became a topic of discussion in the final decades of the last century when software developers tried to design virtual spaces which were designed according to objective parameters which differ from human sensation and experience. Such a non-experts conceptualization might help to maximize the usability of corresponding information systems, rendering the results of work in geospatial ontology compatible with the results of ontological investigations of neighboring domains (hanging them together) and yielding robust and tractable standardizations of geographical terms and concepts.

  18. See https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-ont-20071023/#ontologies.

  19. Gibson (2009, p. 218).

  20. This aim of this classification is to guide the reader through the main geo-ontologies of the contemporary debate, analyzing their fundamental, common and distinctive features, and showing the overlaps between different geographical domains. Obviously, the list is not complete and includes the most discussed, reused and quoted geo-ontologies, together with some non strictly geographical ontologies in which some geographical aspects are described.

  21. In Tambassi and Magro (2015), Tambassi (2016), I name this kind of geo-ontologies Geomatics, topological and geometrical ontologies. Now I think that Spatial ontologies best captures the content of this category in the simplest way.

  22. Cfr. Casati et al. (1998).

  23. See for example: Egenhofer and Mark (1995), Geus and Thiering (2014).

  24. See for example Smith and Mark (2001).

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Acknowledgments

Parts of this article draw on previous material. In particular, Sects. 1 and 2 have some overlaps with Tambassi (2016) while Sect. 5 has some overlaps with Tambassi and Magro (2015) and Tambassi (2016). Thanks are due to Maurizio Lana, Giulia Lasagni, Diego Magro and Achille Varzi for providing comments and feedback, and for their invaluable support.

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    Timothy Tambassi

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Tambassi, T. A Geographical Taxonomy for Geo-ontologies. Axiomathes 27, 355–374 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-016-9309-z

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