Geographic Categories: An Ontological Investigation

Geographic Categories: An Ontological Investigation: "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." (source: David M. Mark and Barry Smith, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis)