Ontology of Geographic Representation

Kejin CuiDepartment of Geography

University at Buffalo

Introduction

• Existed geographic ontology– Lack ontology to analyze spatial data models– There are no links between geographic entities

and spatial data models• Existed research on spatial data models– Lack exploration from perspective of ontology

Overall structure

Data models Geographic entities Geographic events

Field & Object Models

Geo-field: Continuous Geo-object: Discrete

Primitives: Geo-atoms (Goodchild, 2007)

Definition: <x, Z, Z(x)>

Geo-field

6 categories of geo-fields (Goodchild,1993)F1 F2 F3

F4 F5 F6

Geo-object• Four basic elements: Point, Line, Area, Spatio-Temporal_Object• 3 dimensions to describe dynamic geo-objects (Goodchild,2007):

– Movement: Moving VS Stationary– Geometry: Dynamic VS Static – Internal Structure: Evolving VS Rigid

Geo-object

The relationship between geo-field and geo-object

• Object-fields (Cova and Goodchild, 2002)– Mapping each point in a field to an object– Example: Viewshed analysis

• Field-objects (Yuan, 1999)– Representing the internal variation of the property

Z in a geo-object– Example: Hurricane, wildfire

Object fields (Cova and Goodchild, 2002)

Linking geographic entities and data modelsNew object property: is_represented_by

Ontology on representing geographic eventsExample: Hurricane

State Process Event

Future work

• Some more details to be added– 6 categories of geo-fields– Geographic events

• Representing scale effect• Spatial operation with data models

(Occurrent)– Boundary analysis: extracting geo-objects from

geo-fields