Skip to main content

Narrative Geospatial Knowledge in Ethnographies: Representation and Reasoning

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5892))

Abstract

Narrative descriptions about populated places are very common in ethnographies. In old articles and books on the migration history of Taiwan aborigines, for example, narrative sentences are the norms for describing the locations of aboriginal settlements. These narratives constitute a form of geospatial knowledge, and there is a need to develop knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to help analyze literatures, and to aid field works. In this paper, we outline the design of a formal vocabulary to represent and reason about geospatial narratives about populated places, keeping as close as possible to the phrases used in ethnographies. The vocabulary is implemented as OWL concepts and properties, and the rules for geospatial reasoning are expressed in SWRL.

This research is supported in part by National Science Council of Taiwan under grant NSC 98-2410-H-001-075-MY2 (“Ontology–based Collaborative Production of Geospatial Information”).

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. OWL Web Ontology Language Semantics and Abstract Syntax (2004), http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-semantics-20040210

  2. SWRL: A Semantic Web Rule Language Combining OWL and RuleML (2004), http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL

  3. Cai, G.: Contextualization of geospatial database semantics for Human–GIS interaction. Geoinformatica 11(2), 217–237 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Clementini, E., Felice, P.D., Hernández, D.: Qualitative representation of positional information. Artificial Intelligence 95(2), 317–356 (1997)

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  5. Cohn, A.G., Bennett, B., Gooday, J., Gotts, N.M.: Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning with the region connection calculus. GeoInformatica 1(3), 275–316 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Cohn, A.G., Hazarika, S.M.: Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning: An overview. Fundamenta Informaticae 46(1–2), 1–29 (2001)

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  7. Cristani, M., Cohn, A.G.: SpaceML: A mark-up language for spatial knowledge. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 13(1), 97–116 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Egenhofer, M.J., Mark, D.M.: Naive geography. In: Kuhn, W., Frank, A.U. (eds.) COSIT 1995. LNCS, vol. 988, pp. 1–15. Springer, Heidelberg (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Freksa, C.: Using orientation information for qualitative spatial reasoning. In: Frank, A.U., Formentini, U., Campari, I. (eds.) GIS 1992. LNCS, vol. 639, pp. 162–178. Springer, Heidelberg (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Hornsby, K.S., Li, N.: Conceptual framework for modeling dynamic paths from natural language expressions. Transactions in GIS 13(s1), 27–45 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kauppinen, T., Puputti, K., Paakkarinen, P., Kuittinen, H., Väätäinen, J., Hyvönen, E.: Learning and visualizing cultural heritage connections between places on the semantic web. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Inductive Reasoning and Machine Learning on the Semantic Web (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Klippel, A., MacEachren, A., Mitra, P., Turton, I., Jaiswal, A., Soon, K., Zhang, X.: Wayfinding Choremes 2.0 — Conceptual primitives as a basis for translating natural into formal language. In: Van de Weghe, N., Billen, R., Kuijpers, B., Bogaert, P. (eds.) International Workshop on Moving Objects From Natural to Formal Language, Park City, Utah, USA (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Mäs, S.: Reasoning on spatial relations between entity classes. In: Cova, T.J., Miller, H.J., Beard, K., Frank, A.U., Goodchild, M.F. (eds.) GIScience 2008. LNCS, vol. 5266, pp. 234–248. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. Sheth, A., Perry, M.: Traveling the Semantic Web through Space, Time, and Theme. IEEE Internet Computing, 81–86 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Liao, S.–c.: The migration and distribution of the East–Sedeq Atayal (I). Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (44), 61–206 (fall 1977)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Liao, S.–c.: The migration and distribution of the East–Sedeq Atayal (II). Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (45), 81–212 (Spring 1978)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Tenbrink, T.: Space, Time, and the Use of Language: An Investigation of Relationships. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Tomaszewski, B.: Producing geo-historical context from implicit sources: A geovisual analytics approach. The Cartographic Journal 45(3), 165–181 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Chang, C., Chang, Y., Chuang, T., Deng, D., Huang, A.W. (2009). Narrative Geospatial Knowledge in Ethnographies: Representation and Reasoning . In: Janowicz, K., Raubal, M., Levashkin, S. (eds) GeoSpatial Semantics. GeoS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5892. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10436-7_12

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10436-7_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10435-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10436-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics