1. Ontology of Geographic Representation
Kejin Cui
Department of Geography
University at Buffalo

2. Introduction Existed geographic ontology
Lack ontology to analyze spatial data models
There are no links between geographic entities and spatial data models
Existed research on spatial data models
Lack exploration from perspective of ontology

3. Overall structure
Data models
Geographic entities
Geographic events

4. Field & Object Models
Geo-field: Continuous
Geo-object: Discrete

5. Primitives: Geo-atoms (Goodchild, 2007)
Definition: <x, Z, Z(x)>

6. Geo-field

7. 6 categories of geo-fields (Goodchild,1993)

8. Geo-object
Four basic elements: Point, Line, Area, Spatio-Temporal_Object
3 dimensions to describe dynamic geo-objects (Goodchild,2007):
Movement: Moving VS Stationary
Geometry: Dynamic VS Static
Internal Structure: Evolving VS Rigid

9. Geo-object

10. The relationship between geo-field and geo-object
Object-fields (Cova and Goodchild, 2002)
Mapping each point in a field to an object
Example: Viewshed analysis
Field-objects (Yuan, 1999)
Representing the internal variation of the property Z in a geo-object
Example: Hurricane, wildfire

11. Object fields (Cova and Goodchild, 2002)

12. Linking geographic entities and data models New object property: is_represented_by

13. Ontology on representing geographic events Example: Hurricane State  Process  Event

14. Future work Some more details to be added Representing scale effect
6 categories of geo-fields
Geographic events
Representing scale effect
Spatial operation with data models (Occurrent)
Boundary analysis: extracting geo-objects from geo-fields