Generality in artificial intelligence
Communications of the ACM
Sorites paradox and vague geographies
Fuzzy Sets and Systems - Special issue on Uncertainty in geographic information systems and spatial data
The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective
Toward the semantic geospatial web
Proceedings of the 10th ACM international symposium on Advances in geographic information systems
Distinguishing Instances and Evidence of Geographical Concepts for Geospatial Database Design
GIScience '02 Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Geographic Information Science
Similarity-Based Information Retrieval and Its Role within Spatial Data Infrastructures
GIScience '08 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Geographic Information Science
ESWC 2009 Heraklion Proceedings of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference on The Semantic Web: Research and Applications
Similarity as a Quality Indicator in Ontology Engineering
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (FOIS 2008)
An Ontology for Grounding Vague Geographic Terms
Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference (FOIS 2008)
A logical framework for modularity of ontologies
IJCAI'07 Proceedings of the 20th international joint conference on Artifical intelligence
Modular Ontologies for Architectural Design
Proceedings of the 2009 conference on Formal Ontologies Meet Industry
A Functional Ontology of Observation and Measurement
GeoS '09 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics
Algorithm, implementation and application of the SIM-DL similarity server
GeoS'07 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on GeoSpatial semantics
Geospatial semantics: why, of what, and how?
Journal on Data Semantics III
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems
Hi-index | 0.00 |
The categorization of our environment into feature types is an essential prerequisite for cartography, geographic information retrieval, routing applications, spatial decision support systems, and data sharing in general. However, there is no a priori conceptualization of the world and the creation of features and types is an act of cognition. Humans conceptualize their environment based on multiple criteria such as their cultural background, knowledge, motivation, and particularly by space and time. Sharing and making these conceptualizations explicit in a formal, unambiguous way is at the core of semantic interoperability. One way to cope with semantic heterogeneities is by standardization, i.e., by agreeing on a shared conceptualization. This bears the danger of losing local diversity. In contrast, this work proposes the use of microtheories for Spatial Data Infrastructures, such as INSPIRE, to account for the diversity of local conceptualizations while maintaining their semantic interoperability at a global level. We introduce a novel methodology to structure ontologies by spatial and temporal aspects, in our case administrative boundaries, which reflect variations in feature conceptualization. A local, bottom-up approach, based on non-standard inference, is used to compute global feature definitions which are neither too broad nor too specific. Using different conceptualizations of rivers and other geographic feature types, we demonstrate how the present approach can improve the INSPIRE data model and ease its adoption by European member states.