Returning back to my previous post’s concluding question, Sinha et al. (2014) make a statement that can provide some insight: “For a comprehensive understanding [“of different conceptualization systems”], substantial research on geographic cognition, nature of geographic categories, and naïve geography will be needed to discover general principles” (188). This statement relates to our discussions on Open Data last week, specifically how general standards need to be implemented in order to compare all the heterogeneous data. These general standards will develop through various research, including linked (open) data, spatial cognition, and spatial ontology.
Yes, I believe it is valuable to develop general categories that match physical facts cross-culturally; however, I wonder whether our increasing use of technology will dissolve the unique cultural ontologies that exist. Maybe they will be maintained orally, but how will marginalized ontologies be maintained and distinguished through the mass amounts of online data? This article describes the “Geo-Vocabulary Camp” as a “bottom-up” approach that involved “domain experts and ontology engineers… discuss[ing] and implement[ing] patterns for the geospatial domain” (190). Nevertheless, this workshop is still done by experts who, for example, may be taught a marginalized conception rather than actually experiencing first-handily a marginalized ontology. Let me clarify that I respect the team effort to develop ontologies, which shows just how complex and time-consuming it is to design ontological patterns (good luck Olivia), I just hope they include personal marginalized point-of-views in the decision-making scheme. I believe this is a more inductive process and allows more individuals to contribute as well.
As soon as I read the following statement, “a pattern needs to be generic enough to find recurring use in diverse contexts,” it reminded me about the anthropological debates I was taught (191). Within anthropology, structural anthropologists argued in the 1960s-80s that cultures across space can be compared by identifying underlying general patterns, however, post-modernist anthropologists argued back that these methods are too generalizing, ignoring the variations that exist between different individuals within the same space. With this spatial/cultural complexity in mind, and once we come up with a general standard for spatial data, then maybe (hopefully) we can reflect on how to incorporate all the specifics.
-MTM