Spatial relations between classes of individuals

  • Authors:

  • Maureen Donnelly;Thomas Bittner

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Philosophy, New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY;Department of Philosophy, New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY

  • Venue:
  • COSIT'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Spatial Information Theory
  • Year:
  • 2005

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In the Spatial Data Transfer Standard and many other geographic standards and ontologies, we find statements such as (1) “waterfalls are parts of watercourses” and (2) “ecoregions of continental scale are parts of ecoregions of global scale”, etc. In these examples, the terms “waterfall”, “watercourse”, “ecoregion of scale X”, etc. refer to classes of individuals rather than to particular individuals. Since it is the purpose of these standards and ontologies to facilitate interoperability, it is important to give a clear semantics to statements like (1) and (2). For example, (1) should be understood to claim that every waterfall is part of some watercourse, but NOT that every watercourse has a waterfall as its part. In (2), by contrast, the term “part-of” has a stronger meaning: every ecoregion of continental scale is part of some ecoregion of global scale AND every ecoregion of global scale has some ecoregion of continental scale as a part. To overcome this kind of semantic heterogeneity, we propose a Mereotopology for Individuals and Classes (MIC) in which we define parthood, location, and connection relations among classes based on parthood, location, and connection relations between individuals. We then demonstrate the usefulness of this formal theory for making the logical structure of spatial information more precise. Although we focus here on the simplest and most pervasive of the spatial relations (parthood, location, and connection), the strategy employed in this paper can be used in analogous treatments of other kinds of relations among classes.