Towards an Ontology of Landforms

نویسندگان

  • Barry Smith
  • David M. Mark
چکیده

The paper begins with the question “Do mountains exist?” It shows that providing an answer to this question is surprisingly difficult, and that the answer which one gives depends on the context in which the question is posed. Mountains clearly exist as real correlates of everyday human thought and action, and they form the archetype for geographic objects. Yet individual mountains lack many of the properties that characterize bona fide objects, and mountains as a category also lack many of the properties that characterize natural kinds. In the context of scientific modeling of the environment, especially of such phenomena as surface hydrology and fluvial erosion and deposition, mountains are not picked out as constituents of reality in their own right at all; rather they are just parts of the field of elevations whose gradients shape the direction of runoff and influence the intensity of erosion. Thus while an object-based ontology of mountains and other landforms is required to do justice to our everyday conceptions of the environment, and to support spatial reasoning and natural language processing, topographic databases designed to support environmental modeling can be field-based at geographic scales.

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

منابع مشابه

Towards a Common Framework for the Identification of Landforms on Terrain Models

A landform is a physical feature of the terrain with its own recognisable shape. Its definition is often qualitative and inherently vague. Hence, landforms are difficult to formalise in a logical model that can be implemented. We propose for that purpose a framework where these qualitative and vague definitions are transformed successively during different phases to yield an implementable data ...

متن کامل

Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landforms

The authors begin the paper with the question `Do mountains exist?' They show that providing an answer to this question is surprisingly difficult and that the answer that one gives depends on the context in which the question is posed. Mountains clearly exist as real correlates of everyday human thought and action, and they form the archetype for geographic objects. Yet individual mountains lac...

متن کامل

Query Architecture Expansion in Web Using Fuzzy Multi Domain Ontology

Due to the increasing web, there are many challenges to establish a general framework for data mining and retrieving structured data from the Web. Creating an ontology is a step towards solving this problem. The ontology raises the main entity and the concept of any data in data mining. In this paper, we tried to propose a method for applying the "meaning" of the search system, But the problem ...

متن کامل

An Ontology for Submarine Feature Representation on Charts

A landform is a subjective individuation of a part of a terrain. Landform recognition is a difficult task because its definition usually relies on a qualitative and fuzzy description. Achieving automatic recognition of landforms requires a formal definition of the landforms properties and their modelling. In the maritime domain, the International Hydrographic Organisation published a standard t...

متن کامل

Detection and Delineation of Topographic Eminences

Topographic eminence is a basic level category representing all convex shaped topographic landforms rising above their immediate surroundings. As opposed to everyday objects, the properties of an eminence are dependent on how it is conceptualized and where it is delineated. Research has shown that there are multiple conceptualizations of eminences (and other landforms) depending on cultural and...

متن کامل

ذخیره در منابع من


  با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید

برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید

ثبت نام

اگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید

عنوان ژورنال:

دوره   شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2003