Geospatial Semantics: Honey! You’re Driving too FAST!
Few days ago, I saw a post on the semanticweb group that asks the question: “how to explain to humans the term ontology?” In a different context, I wonder how to explain geospatial semantics to humans?
Let me give this a try.
Geospatial semantics is the study of how humans perceive geographical concepts in their everyday life, and how to exploit this understanding to create useful computing systems to increase our productivity. The shared semantics of our natural languages enable us to communicate and convey ideas. When we reference geographical concepts in our everyday conversations, we also share a common understanding of the semantics of these geographical concepts (at least for most of the time if not all the time).
For example, when a wife says to a husband, “Honey! You’re driving too fast!”, the husband puts on the break and slows the car down. In this scenario, we see that what contributed to the husband’s action is a common understanding of the term “fast” and its semantic relation respect to their current context. The context of this couple includes, for example, (1) their current driving speed and (2) the legal speed limit of the road that they are travelling on. The semantic relation between these factors contributes to the slowing down of their car.
[…] Once we understand tags are not ontology, we can immediately conclude that geospatial ontology is not just a bunch of tags. What makes geospatial ontology so interesting is that much of the information in our everyday life involves some kind geospatial ontology. If we are on the path to develop computing systems that could understand the semantics of our blog posts, for example, we must pay extra attention to geospatial ontology. […]
Pingback by Geospatial Semantic Web Blog » Blog Archive » Is Geospatial Ontology Just a Bunch of Tags? — January 17, 2006 @ 10:02 am
The definition is convicing. However, could you tell the difference between the “Geospatial semantics” and Egenhofer and Mark (1995)s’ “Naive Geography” which defines as : “The body of knowledge that people have about the surrounding geographic world.”
ref: Egenhofer, M. J., and Mark, D. M., 1995. Naive Geography. In Frank, A. U. and Kuhn, W., editors, Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences No. 988, 1-15.
Comment by Andrea Huang — May 2, 2006 @ 1:35 am
Andrea, thank you for the question. It has been awhile since I read Dr. Egenhofer’s paper on Native Geography. Let me take a look at his paper again, and I promise I will come back to your question in a future blog post. - Harry C.
Comment by harrychen — May 2, 2006 @ 1:00 pm
[…] After reading this blog entry, a reader asks the following: The definition [of geospatial semantics] is convincing. However, could you tell the difference between the “Geospatial semantics” and Egenhofer and Mark (1995)s’ “Naive Geography” which defines as : “The body of knowledge that people have about the surrounding geographic world.” […]
Pingback by Geospatial Semantic Web Blog » Blog Archive » On Naive Geography and Geospatial Semantics — May 9, 2006 @ 5:51 pm