What Are Sports Grounds?

Abstract

Beyond technical aspects, interoperability of Geographic Information Systems is widely recognized to include semantic aspects. It is not yet clearly understood, however, which problems in data sharing stem from semantic issues and how they affect people’s work. In order to gain a better understanding, this paper takes noise abatement related to sports grounds as a practical example of data sharing and examines in detail the semantic issues arising with the usage of two key terms. The first term we look at is “relevant sports ground”. The selection of sports grounds that are considered by noise abatement planning is based on it. The second term is “sports ground” as such. The understanding of it determines how sports grounds are modeled in various data sets that might serve as an information source for noise assessment. We show that the meaning of sports grounds lies in their usage, at least in the case of noise abatement, and that available data sets do not contain the necessary usage information. Furthermore, we show that the available geometric data only become useful when several sources are combined: interoperability is required to map between data and user semantics.