Multi-cultural Aspects of Spatial Knowledge

It is trivial to observe differences between cultures: people use different languages, have different modes of building houses and organize their cities differently, to mention only a few. Differences in the culture of different people were and still are one of the main reasons for travel to foreign countries. The question whether cultural differences are relevant for the construction of Geographic Information Systems is longstanding (Burrough et al. 1995) and is of increasing interest since geographic information is widely accessible using the web and users volunteer information to be included in the system (Goodchild 2007). The review of how the question of cultural differences was posed at different times reveals a great deal about the conceptualization of GIS at different times and makes a critical review interesting. At the heart of the discussion of cultural differences relevant for GIScience is a Whorfian hypothesis that different cultural backgrounds could be responsible for differences in the way space and spatial relations are conceived. Whorf claimed that people using a language with more differentiation, for example in terms describing different types of snow, also perceive reality differently from people using a language with less differentiation (Carroll 1956). An early contribution picked up on suggestions made by Mark and others (Mark et al. 1989b) and identified several distinct issues that could be investigated individually (Campari et al. 1993):