The ontology of virtual geographical environment

Abstract

After the concept of virtual geographical environment (VGE) has been initiated, related issues to it are becoming research hotspots in geographic information science. It shows its comprehensive application prospects in different fields to human; even in geography some celebrated scholars think that VGE is becoming new generation language after verbal language, maps, GIS. The concept initiation of VGE is just more than ten years, many theoretical and technical issues related is yet to be probed into, so profound reflect on VGE from a philosophical perspective to explore its ontological issues will be of significance. In this paper we discuss several questions of ontology of VGE, and probe into some issues related to it such as methodology, axiology and so on. VGE is a “being”, but is different to real geographical environment as a “being”, it is a “being” we call “artificial information field” and is of some cognition characteristics of real geographic environment. VGE has a close connection with the digital technology and is a “digital geographic environment” in fact. The sense of reality in VGE is different to the sense of reality in actual geographical environment from an ontological perspective and is of dependence on techniques and is not holographic like that human perceive the real nature geographical environment. Practice in VGE is not of ontological equality to practice in real geographical environment. VGE is of philosophical limitations, and the value of VGE remains yet to be not sure and to be measured.