Ontologies of the geographic world are important to allow the sharing of geographic data among different communities of users. A geo-ontology provides a description of geographical entities, which can be conceptualised in two different views of the world. The field view considers spatial data to be a set of continuous distributions. The object view conceives the world as occupied by discrete, identifiable entities. Objects and fields are not merely located in space, they are tied intrinsically to space. However, to properly represent changes, it is also necessary to describe concepts that convey the dynamics of spatial phenomena. The notions of events and processes are useful to explicitly include the temporal dimension. The lectures present a general overview of the main trends in Geospatial Ontology, discussing the concepts of objects, fields and events for representation of geographical phenomena. The course also highlights the specific area of land use and land cover ontology, an area of considerable importance for geospatial ontology research.

Lecture: Geographical Objects

Suggested Reading:

• Barry Smith and David Mark, Ontology and geographic kinds. Proceedings, International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Vancouver, Canada, 1998.
• Barry Smith and David Mark, Geographical categories: an ontological investigation. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15(7)591-612, 2001.
• Barry Smith and David Mark, “Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landforms”. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 30(3):411–427, 2003.
• Antony Galton, “On the ontological status of geographical boundaries”. In Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild and Michael F. Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Taylor and Francis, 2003, pages 151-171.
• Edward Robinson, “Reexamining fiat, bona fide and force dynamic boundaries for geopolitical entities and their placement in DOLCE.”. Applied Ontology 7.1 (2012): 93-108.
• Fred Fonseca, Max Egenhofer, Peggy Agouris, Gilberto Camara, Ontologies for Integrated GIS. Transactions on GIS, 6(3):231-257, 2002.

Questions to Ponder

Lecture: Fields

Suggested Reading:

• Helen Couclelis, “People manipulate objects (but cultivate fields): Beyond the raster-vector debate in GIS”. In: Frank, A., Campari, I., Formentini, U. (eds.) Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space. LNCS, vol. 639. Springer, 1992.
• Gilberto Camara, Max Egenhofer, Karine Ferreira, Pedro Andrade, Gilberto Queiroz, Alber Sanchez, Jim Jones, Lubia Vinhas, “Fields as a Generic Type for Big Spatial Data”. GIScience 2014 Conference.
• Karen Kemp, “Fields as a framework for integrating GIS and environmental process models”. Transactions in GIS 1(3):219–234, 1996.

Questions to Ponder

Lecture: Dynamic Spatial Ontologies

Suggested reading:

• Andrew Frank, “Ontology for Spatio-temporal Databases”. In Spatio-Temporal Databases: The Chorochronos Approach (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2520), edited by Manoulis Koubarakis and Timos Sellis, 9-78. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• Mike Worboys, Event-oriented approaches to geographic phenomena. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19(1):1-28, 2005.
• Antony Galton, “Fields and Objects in Space, Time, and Space-time”. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 4(1):39-68, 2004.
• Antony Galton & Riichiro Mizoguchi,“The Water Falls but the Waterfall does not Fall: New perspectives on Objects, Processes and Events”. Applied Ontology, 4(2):71—107, 2009.
• Grenon, P. & Smith, B.,SNAP and SPAN: Towards dynamic spatial ontology. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 4(1), 69–104, 2004.
• Karine Ferreira, Gilberto Camara, Miguel Monteiro, “An algebra for spatiotemporal data: from observations to events”. Transactions in GIS,18(2):253–269,2014.

Questions to Ponder

Lecture: Land Use and Land Cover Ontology

SUggested reading:

• Robin Chazdon et al., When is a forest a forest? Forest concepts and definitions in the era of forest and landscape restoration. Ambio, 1–13, 2016.
• Alex Comber, Wadsworth, R., & Fisher, P., Using semantics to clarify the conceptual confusion between land cover and land use: the example of ‘forest’. Journal of Land Use Science, 3(2-3), 185–198, 2008.
• Ohla Ahlqvist, In search of classification that supports the dynamics of science: the FAO Land Cover Classification System and proposed modifications. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 35(1), 169–186, 2008.
• Martin Herold, Curtis E Woodcock, Antonio Di Gregorio, Philippe Mayaux, Alan S Belward, John Latham, Christiane C Schmullius, A joint initiative for harmonization and validation of land cover datasets. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 44(7):1719-1727, 2006.
• Martin Herold, Robert Hubald, Antonio Di Gregorio,Translating and evaluating land cover legends using the UN Land Cover Classification System (LCCS). GOGC-GOLD Report, 43, 2008.
• Louisa Jansen, Geoff Groom and Giancarlo Carrai, Land-cover harmonisation and semantic similarity: some methodological issues. Journal of Land Use Science, 3(2–3):131–160, 2008.
• Fred Fonseca, Gilberto Câmara, Miguel Monteiro, A framework for measuring the interoperability of geo-ontologies. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 6(4), 309–331, 2006.

Questions to Ponder

Lecture: Axiomatic Theory

Suggested reading:

• Antony Galton,Outline of a Formal Theory of Processes and Events, and Why GIScience Needs One. In COSIT 2015 (pp. 3–22), 2015.
• Mike Goodchild, May Yuan, & Tom Cova, “Towards a general theory of geographic representation in GIS”. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 21(3), pp.239-260, 2007.
• Werner Kuhn, “Core concepts of spatial information for transdisciplinary research”. International Journal of Geographic Information Science vol.26(12), 2012.