Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries: Towards on Ontology of Spatially Extended Objects
COSIT '97 Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS
Ontology and Geographic Objects: An Empirical Study of Cognitive Categorization
COSIT '99 Proceedings of the International Conference on Spatial Information Theory: Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Geographic Information Science
DOLCE ergo SUMO: On foundational and domain models in the SmartWeb Integrated Ontology (SWIntO)
Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web
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Applied Ontology
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The purpose of this article is to reexamine the ontology of geopolitical boundaries so that they can be better represented in ontologies designed for the semantic web. Previous work on this subject has divided geopolitical boundaries into fiat, bona fide, and lorce dynamic categories. This article challenges the existence of bona fide geopolitical boundaries on the basis that many of them lie skew to physical discontinuities on the earth, maritime territorial claims do not follow physical discontinuities, and geopolitical boundaries are three-dimensional, not two-dimensional objects. This also allows for a necessary ontological distinction to he made between the geopolitical boundaries and their physical markers. This analysis is used to determine the placement of geopolitical boundaries, territory, states, and nations in the Descriptive Ontology lot Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE). DOLCE has a cognitive bias making it particularly suitable for formulating an ontology of mind-dependent geopolitical entities. However, rather than distinguishing between the physical and nonphysical based on whether or not the entity in question has direct spatial qualities, this article puts forward that a distinction needs to be made based on whether or not an entity in question is made of matter. A material/immaterial distinction may be more intuitive for an ontology of "common sense".