Max J. Egenhofer – författare

In an effort to further investigation into critical development facets of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this book explores the reasoning processes that apply to geographic space and time. As a result of an iniative sponsored by the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), it treats the computational, cognitive and social science applications aspects of spatial and temporal reasoning in GIS. Essays were contributed by scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines including: geography, cartography, surveying and engineering, computer science, mathematics and environmental and cognitive psychology.

A significant part of understanding how people use geographic information and technology concerns human cognition. This book provides the first comprehensive in-depth examination of the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction for geographic information systems (GIS). Cognitive aspects are treated in relation to individual, group, behavioral, institutional, and cultural perspectives. Extensions of GIS in the form of spatial decision support systems and SDSS for groups are part of the geographic information technology considered. Audience: Geographic information users, systems analysts and system designers, researchers in human-computer interaction will find this book an information resource for understanding cognitive aspects of geographic information technology use, and the methods appropriate for examining this use.

Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable asa secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable asa secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable asa secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

This section gives a description of notions used throughout this study. Current achievements in developing action-centered ontologies are also discussed. 2.1 Ontologies In the context of information extraction and retrieval, different kinds of ontologies can be distinguished [15]: • Top-level ontologies describe very general concepts like space and time, not depending on a particular domain, • Domain ontologies and task ontologies describe the vocabulary related to a generic domain or kind of task, detailing the terms used in the top-level ontology, • Application ontologies describe the concepts that depend on the particular domain and task within a specific activity. Several investigations have been conducted to bring actions (tasks) to bear on - tologies. Among them are Chandrasekaran et al. [6] and Mizoguchi et al. [23] in the fields of AI and Knowledge Engineering. For the geospatial domain, Kuhn [21] and Raubal and Kuhn [26] have attempted to support human actions in ontologies for transportation. Acknowledging the importance of human actions in the geographic domain, a research workshop was held in 2002, bringing together experts from diff- ent disciplines to share the knowledge and work on this issue [1]. Camara [5], one of the workshop participants, has proposed that action-driven spatial ontologies are formed via category theory, for the case of emergency action plans.

This section gives a description of notions used throughout this study. Current achievements in developing action-centered ontologies are also discussed. 2.1 Ontologies In the context of information extraction and retrieval, different kinds of ontologies can be distinguished [15]: • Top-level ontologies describe very general concepts like space and time, not depending on a particular domain, • Domain ontologies and task ontologies describe the vocabulary related to a generic domain or kind of task, detailing the terms used in the top-level ontology, • Application ontologies describe the concepts that depend on the particular domain and task within a specific activity. Several investigations have been conducted to bring actions (tasks) to bear on - tologies. Among them are Chandrasekaran et al. [6] and Mizoguchi et al. [23] in the fields of AI and Knowledge Engineering. For the geospatial domain, Kuhn [21] and Raubal and Kuhn [26] have attempted to support human actions in ontologies for transportation. Acknowledging the importance of human actions in the geographic domain, a research workshop was held in 2002, bringing together experts from diff- ent disciplines to share the knowledge and work on this issue [1]. Camara [5], one of the workshop participants, has proposed that action-driven spatial ontologies are formed via category theory, for the case of emergency action plans.

GeoS 2005wasthe 1st InternationalConferenceon GeospatialSemantics. It was held in Mexico City, November 29 and 30, 2005. Within the domain of geographic information science (GIS), semantics has become one of the most prominent researchthemes over the last few years.Such concepts as ontology-driven geographic information systems and the geospatial Semantic Web have fuelled a plethora of researchin such areas as geo-ontologies andsemanticsimilarity.ThesetopicscomplementthetraditionalfocusinGIS- search, which has dealt primarily with geometric entities, their spatial relations, and e?cient data structures. Geospatial semantics are expected to play an - creasingly important role for next-generation spatial databases and geographic information systems, as well as for specialized geospatial Web services. GeoS2005wasorganizedinordertoprovideaforumfortheexchangeofsta- of-the-art research results in the areas of modeling and processing of geospatial semantics.Of particular interest were contributions that addressed theories for geospatialsemanticinformation;formalrepresentationsforgeospatialdata;m- elsandlanguagesforgeo-ontologies;alignmentandintegrationofgeo-ontologies; integration of semantics into spatial query processing; similarity comparisons of spatial datasets; ontology-based spatial information retrieval; ontology-driven GIS; geospatial Semantic Web; and multicultural aspects of spatial knowledge. This volume contains 19 papers, which were selected from among 42 subm- sions received in response to the Call for Papers. Each submission was reviewed by three or four Program Committee members and 15 long and 4 short papers were chosen for presentation. Authors of papers included in this volume come from11di?erentcountries,highlightingthebreadthoftheinternationalresearch community that focuses its attention on geospatial semantics. The program was rounded o? with an invited keynote by Jerry Hobbs, and poster presentations.

The initiation of the GIScience conference series came with the observation that the GIScience ?eld has a widely fragmented conference landscape. Many papers on geographic information science are presented not only at such specialized meetings as the biennial Conferences on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT), the Symposia on Spatial and Temporal databases (SSTD), the International Symposia on Spatial Accuracy, the Symposia on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), or the ACM Workshop on Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS), but also at the large meetings of the professional organizations that deal with - ographic information systems. The lack of an opportunity to exchange ideas across the disciplinary specializations led to the creation of the GIScience c- ference series as a forum for all GIScience researchers who are interested in the advances in research in the fundamental aspects of geographic information s- ence. The ?rst meeting was held in Savannah, Georgia, USA, in October 2000 (www. giscience. org/GIScience2000) with 120 paper presentations (selected from the submission of extended abstracts) and over 300 attendees.GIScience 2002 in Boulder, Colorado, USA followed this highly successful inaugural meeting. Atrademarkoftheresearch?eldofgeographicinformationscienceisthed- ciplinary mixture of researchers contributing the advancement of our knowledge. One typically ?nds cognitive scientists, computer scientists, engineers, geog- phers,informationscientists,mathematicians,philosophers,psychologists,social scientists,andstatisticians. Ofcourse,thislistisneitherexhaustivenorexclusive. Acriticalaspectforthesuccessofthe?eldisthedialogamongtheseresearchers, becauseadvancesalongthemanyintersectionsofthecontributingdisciplinesare paramount for geographic information science, requiring the concurrent att- tionfromresearchersfrommultipledisciplines. TheGIScienceconferencesaimto serve as the disciplinary melting pot for geographic information science research.

This book presents the proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on large Spatial Databases, SSD '95, held in Portland, Maine, USA in August 1995.The 23 refereed full papers presented were selected from more than 60 submissions and describe the state-of-the-art in the expanding field of large spatial databases, with a certain emphasis on an upcoming new generation of spatial database management systems. The volume is organized in sections on spatial data models, spatial data mining, spatial query processing, multiple representations, open GIS, geo-algorithms, reasoning about spatial relations, spatial joins, and benchmarks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2011, held in Belfast, ME, USA, in September 2011. The 23 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on maps and navigation, spatial change, spatial reasoning, spatial cognition and social aspects of space, perception and spatial semantics, and space and language.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory, COSIT 2011, held in Belfast, ME, USA, in September 2011. The 23 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on maps and navigation, spatial change, spatial reasoning, spatial cognition and social aspects of space, perception and spatial semantics, and space and language.

A significant part of understanding how people use geographic information and technology concerns human cognition. This book provides the first comprehensive in-depth examination of the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction for geographic information systems (GIS). Cognitive aspects are treated in relation to individual, group, behavioral, institutional, and cultural perspectives. Extensions of GIS in the form of spatial decision support systems and SDSS for groups are part of the geographic information technology considered. Audience: Geographic information users, systems analysts and system designers, researchers in human-computer interaction will find this book an information resource for understanding cognitive aspects of geographic information technology use, and the methods appropriate for examining this use.