An Ontology Design Pattern for Surface Water Features: Sinha et al. 2014

Ontology is the study of what a conceptual model should encapsulate to represent reality. But what about the when?

This week, I began reading the more theoretical article on geographic ontologies (Smith & Mark, 2001), but quickly found that the discussion was much too difficult to wrap my head around. I read Sinha and colleagues’ article hoping to understand why ontologies are important for GIScience, and indeed was able to grasp the theory of ontologies much better with the use of surface water features as an example of how an ontology is built, and why it is important to build in the first place.

While the article admits that spatial scale at which the features are represented is still a significant challenge to the success of this ontology (and others), I think that the temporal relationships between the features and the stochastic nature of the features themselves over time is and will be the biggest hurdle for this field of study. The varying levels of abstraction of the ontology appear to be effective in describing geophysical phenomena at first thought. However, the stochastic nature of many of these features (such as streams drying up or freezing) seasonally is important to include in an ontology of such features if the ontology is to be used for further study of landforms.

I found this article to be very helpful in teaching the geographically-inclined to better understand ontologies, but found it to be lacking in the discussion of temporality. That being said, I do not pretend do understand ontologies after having read these two articles alone. It is highly likely that the temporal characteristics of surface water features are captured at lower levels of abstraction in other ontologies that will be or already are connected to this surface water feature model.

My last thought regarding this topic is that of how geocomplexity fits into the conversation. I think that it is important to understand how people (not just academics) represent static snapshots of reality before attempting to represent and model dynamic systems. These articles made me realize that though the discussion around ontologies can be painfully philosophical at times, it is such fundamental issues such as these that need to talked about more, especially in GISCience and geocomplexity science.

-ClaireM

Smith, Barry and David Mark. 2001. Geographical categories: an ontological investigation. International Journal of Geographical Information science 15(7): 591-612.

Sinha, Gaurav, David Mark, Dave Kolas, Dalia Varanka, Boleslo E. Romero, Chen-Chieh Feng, E. Lynn Usery, Joshua Liebermann, and Alexandre Sorokine. 2014. An Ontology Design Patter for Surface Water Features. Geographic Information Science, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 8279: 187-203.

 

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