Geographic Categories: An Ontological Investigation

David M. Mark and Barry Smith

National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

Categories are an essential aspect of human cognition. Geographic categories have received little study, yet they are important to geographic information systems and spatial data transfer as well as to our understanding of geographic cognition in general. Deductive studies have indicated that geographic objects have important ontological features distinct from those of objects encountered at table-top scales (Smith and Mark 1998). This NSF-funded project is developing a formal ontology for geographic entities and categories, based on rigorous empirical research using human subjects. Parallel studies will be conducted in several languages and regions, so that the resulting ontology will be multilingual.

Publications Resulting from the Grant:

2003 and in press

Thomas Bittner and Barry Smith. Granular Spatio-Temporal Ontologies, To appear in: Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Foundations and Applications of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (FASTR)
Thomas Bittner and Barry Smith. Vague Reference and Approximating Judgements, forthcoming in Spatial Cognition and Computation.
Thomas Bittner and Barry Smith, A Theory of Granular Partitions, Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Matthew Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild and Michael F. Worboys, eds., London: Taylor & Francis, 117-151.
David M Mark and Barry Smith. A Science of Topography: Bridging the Qualitative-Quantitative Divide In Michael P. Bishop and Jack Shroder, editors Geographic Information Science and Mountain Geomorphology Chichester, England: Springer-Praxis, accepted, in press.
David M. Mark, Barry Smith, Max Egenhofer, and Stephen Hirtle, Ontological Foudations for Geographic Information Science, forthcoming in R.B. McMaster and L. Usery (eds.), Research Challenges in Geographic Information Science, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Barry Smith, Carving Up Reality in M. Gorman and J. Sanford (eds.), Categories: Proceedings of the Conference of the American Metaphysical Society, Buffalo, March 2001, in preparation.
Barry Smith, Ontology and Information Systems, forthcoming in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard, A Unified Theory of Truth and Reference, Logique et Analyse, forthcoming.
Barry Smith and David M. Mark, 2003, Do Mountains Exist? Towards an Ontology of Landforms. Environment and Planning B, 30(3), 411-427.
Barry Smith and Leo Zaibert, Real Estate: Foundations of the Ontology of Property, in Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Erik Stubjkaer and Christoph Schlieder (eds.), The Ontology and Modelling of Real Estate Transactions, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, 51-67.

2002

Barry Smith and Achille C. Varzi, Surrounding Space: On the Ontology of Organism-Environment Relations Theory in Bioscience, Theory in Bioscience, 121 (2002), 139-162.
Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard, 2002. Quantum Mereotopology Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 7, pp. 591-612.

2001

David M. Mark, Andre Skupin, and Barry Smith, 2001. Features, Objects, and other Things: Ontological Distinctions in the Geographic Domain, in Daniel Montello (ed.), Spatial Information Theory, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205, Berlin/New York: Springer, pp. 488-502.
Barry Smith, 2001. True Grid, Ontological Distinctions in the Geographic Domain, in Daniel Montello (ed.), Spatial Information Theory, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205, Berlin/New York: Springer, pp. 14-27.
Thomas Bittner and Barry Smith, 2001. A Taxonomy of Granular Partitions: Ontological Distinctions in the Geographic Domain, in Daniel Montello (ed.), Spatial Information Theory, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205, Berlin/New York: Springer, pp. 28-43. Link to an expanded version of the paper.]
Barry Smith and Christopher Welty, editors, 2001, Ontology: Towards a New Synthesis, introduction to: Christopher Welty and Barry Smith (eds.), Formal Ontology and Information Systems, New York: ACM Press, pp. iii-ix.
Thomas Bittner and Barry Smith, 2001. Vagueness, Granularity and Partitions, forthcoming in Christopher Welty and Barry Smith (eds.), Formal Ontology and Information Systems, New York: ACM Press, pp. 309-321.
Wolfgang Degen, Barbara Heller, Heinrich Herre and Barry Smith, 2001. GOL: A General Ontological Language in Christopher Welty and Barry Smith (eds.), Formal Ontology and Information Systems, New York: ACM Press, 34-46.
Barry Smith, 2001. Fiat Objects, Topoi, 20(2): 2, pp. 131-148.
Barry Smith and Leonardo Zaibert, 2001. The Metaphysics of Real Estate, Topoi, 20(2): pp. 161-172.
Barry Smith and David M. Mark, 2001, Geographic Categories: An Ontological Investigation International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15 (7), 591-612.
Barry Smith and Achille C. Varzi, 2001. Environmental Metaphysics, in U. Meixner, ed., Metaphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age. Proceedings of the 22nd International Wittgenstein-Symposium, Vienna: bv&hpt, 231-239.

1999

David M. Mark, Barry Smith, and Barbara Tversky, 1999. Ontology and Geographic Objects: An Empirical Study of Cognitive Categorization. In Freksa, C., and Mark, D. M., Editors, Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science No. 1661, pp. 283-298.

Other related publications:

Barry Smith and David M. Mark, 1999, Ontology with Human Subjects Testing: An Empirical Investigation of Geographic Categories American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 58: 2, April 1999, 245-272.
Barry Smith and David M. Mark, 1998, Ontology and Geographic Kinds. In T. K. Poiker and N. Chrisman (eds.), Proceedings. 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH'98), Vancouver: International Geographical Union, 308-320.

Last updated on June 11, 2002

This project is supported by Geography & Regional Science award DGE-9975557 from the National Science Foundation and by the University at Buffalo.
Support from NSF is gratefully acknowledged.