The first thing I noticed was that Smith & Mark start with a much more philosophical definition of ontology, as being focused on describing “the constituents of reality…in a systematic way”, as opposed to Kuhn’s definition diving straight into specification of conceptualisations through language which bypasses the question of existence. It was interesting to see the two approaches – one from the domain based ontology and the other from the more holistic approach.
Smith and Mark provide a good overview of ontology, especially primary and secondary theory and the separation of the two. However, their actual suggestions on the future of geospatial ontology is quite scarce, apart from stressing the need for an all encompassing ontology that is general enough to be used in any scenario, but also able to be tweaked as well.
Kuhn on the other hand goes through the interesting process of creating an ontology, and puts more detail into concepts such as affordances. The methodology he goes through is interesting, but still very much dependent upon a textual source. The choice of that source is absolutely crucial – choosing a text in a certain language is probably already resulting in a loss in ‘resolution’ (if that term may be appropriate here), but it is after all, a domain specific ontology, in which case – why translate it to English in the first place (I must note at this point that I am definitely not an expert in the field of ontology).
What I would like to question though is whether or not having separate ontologies is necessarily a big problem. The ontologies used everyday I think are very much a cultural phenomenon in such that they are and should be flexible and malleable according to what humans do and the scale at which we are able to perceive things. In trying to create a formal ontology (an ontology that is unbiased and constant, independent of content), one is probably (as madskiier suggests) limiting the ability to express oneself. The nature of the world is dynamic and human knowledge increasing, so perhaps it is the nature of ontologies to grow, rather than be static. I do agree however that issues of translation and cataloguing are very reliant on ontology, but having separate domain based ontologies should still be the way to go, in order to preserve as much detail as possible.
Finally – what would a formal geographic ontology do for the imagination and communication? It may make the world a slightly more boring place
-Peck
*yes. cold desert environment.