Spatial Ontology Research Articles

Spatial ontology and digital print

The author's 1999 doctoral submission, ‘Integrated Artworks: Theory and Practice in relation to Printmaking and Computers, and the influence of ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ and ‘the fourth dimension’ on developments in Twentieth-Century Pictorial Space’ examined relations between spatial art practice and theory, digital technology, print and photomechanical imaging methods, hyperspace philosophy and recent art-historical analyses of developments in pictorial space during the quarter-century preceding the First World War. This paper, presented at ‘The Enactment of Thinking’ conference at the University of Plymouth in July 2001, introduces aspects of this research and examines, specifically, ideas from geometry and hyperspace philosophy, and key terms including shadows, slices, projections and the dimensional analogy, to assist in understanding and visualizing historically significant but unconventional modes of spatial discourse. Examples of the author's work are included and help to relate theory to practice within the research.

On the definition of generic multi-layered ontologies for urban applications

Cooperation of information systems is essential for providing decision support for urban management applications. This involves sharing data across collections of the heterogeneous information systems that are used to manage large urban infrastructures. The objective of this work is to define a spatial ontology to describe key features of urban applications, providing a foundation for semantic reconciliation among heterogeneous spatial information sources. We propose a multi-layered ontologies definition framework consisting of ontology layers which are composed of a generic functional structure and one or more domain ontologies. The functional structure embodies general ontological concepts described as abstract data types. The domain ontologies are created by specializing the properties and constraints of the functional structure. Inter-ontology relationships are defined to integrate information across functional ontological layers and used to query multiple domain ontologies.

Ontologies for Plane, Polygonal Mereotopology

Several authors have suggested that a more parsimonious and conceptually elegant treatment of everyday mereological and topological reasoning can be obtained by adopting a spatial ontology in which regions, not points, are the primitive entities. This paper challenges this suggestion for mereotopological reasoning in two-dimensional space. Our strategy is to define a mereotopological language together with a familiar, point-based interpretation. It is proposed that, to be practically useful, any alternative region-based spatial ontology must support the same sentences in our language as this familiar interpretation. This proposal has the merit of transforming a vague, open-ended question about ontologies for practical mereotopological reasoning into a precise question in model theory. We show that (a version of) the familiar interpretation is countable and atomic, and therefore prime. We conclude that useful alternative ontologies of the plane are, if anything, less parsimonious than the one which they are supposed to replace.

Spatial Ontology and Explanation

Abstract This paper presents an account of spatial ontology and explanation that highlights a largely ignored dimension of social spatiality: the opening and occupation of places for activity that automatically occurs whenever there is human life. The first part analyzes this space of places on the basis of Heidegger's account of ongoing life, and uses the resulting analysis to describe the spatiality of social formations. The second part analyzes spatial explanation on the basis of this spatial ontology. It (a) argues that the explanation and explanatory uses in social science of the spatial properties of social phenomena do not differ in principle from the explanation and explanatory uses of other features of social life, and (b) defends two existing versions of socio-spatial dialectics. Attention is given to the nature of explanation, the character of social causality, and the proper types of explanation in social investigation.