Ontologies are such an interesting and abstract field to me. In the lab I work in, there are many people who develop ontologies (some spatial, some not) and I always struggle to comprehend what they are or how I could ever explain them to someone. They seem to be classification systems or ways of understanding trends in different types of data. For example, one project is based on looking through blog posts on vaccines and classifying the content as “pro-vaccine”, “anti-vaccine” or neutral. The idea of how you would do this was completely abstract to me before I read this paper, now I can see how it fits into some of these concepts. The ‘sentiment’ of the blog is similar to a “secondary theory” relating to the content. As with many analytical models, ontologies to capture spatial trends are more complicated than their aspatial counterparts, but also raises a whole new set of interesting challenges (e.g., issues of scale). Looking forward to the presentation tomorrow and maybe finally really understanding ontologies!
-Kathryn
[PS My spell-check in firefox seems to thing “ontologies’ isn’t a word and wants to change it to gerontologist…]