Abstract
Place is an elusive notion in geographic information science. This paper presents an approach to capture the notion of place by contrast. This approach is developed from cognitive concepts and the language that is used to describe places. It is complementary to those of coordinate-based systems that dominate contemporary geographic information systems. Accordingly, the approach is aimed at explaining structures in verbal place descriptions and at localizing objects without committing to geometrically specified positions in space. We will demonstrate how locations can be identified by place names that are not crisply defined in terms of geometric regions. Capturing the human cognitive notion of place is considered crucial for smooth communication between human users and computer-based geographic assistance systems.
Highlights
Goodchild recently wrote about the tension, when it comes to the notion of place, between formal models needed by computers and the informal world of human discourse [19]
Place has been an elusive notion in geographic information science for this reason until recently, but place-related research emerges because capturing the human cognitive notion of place is considered crucial for smooth communication between human users and computer-based geographic assistance systems [35, 49, 60, 68]
This implies that a place P, with a relative reference system X, can be specified by contrast (P against X\P ), while a location cannot be specified by contrast, due to the infinite number of alternatives in a continuous space
Summary
Goodchild recently wrote about the tension, when it comes to the notion of place, between formal models needed by computers and the informal world of human discourse [19]. Freksa and Barkowsky [14] argue, for example, that the categorization into entities and relations is task-dependent The authors illustrate this with street networks. Even externalized knowledge, stored in spatial databases, is challenged by the task of representing places, for a variety of reasons such as indeterminacy, context-dependence of meanings, vernacular expressions, or just the discrepancy between the formal semantics of databases and the cognitive semantics of everyday reasoning. In this paper we will attempt to capture the cognitive and linguistic nature of notions of places, as expressed in place names or place descriptions, by the principle of contrast.
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