A spatio-temporal ontology for geographic information integration |
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| Authors: | Thomas Bittner Maureen Donnelly Barry Smith |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Philosophy , State University of New York at Buffalo , Buffalo , NY , USA;2. Department of Geography , State University of New York at Buffalo , Buffalo , NY , USA;3. New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences , State University of New York at Buffalo , Buffalo , NY , USA;4. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) , State University of New York at Buffalo , Buffalo , NY , USA bittner3@buffalo.edu;6. New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences , State University of New York at Buffalo , Buffalo , NY , USA;7. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) , State University of New York at Buffalo , Buffalo , NY , USA |
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| Abstract: | This paper presents an axiomatic formalization of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation and membership. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical for geographic information processing. The axiomatic theory is developed using Isabelle, a computational system for implementing logical formalisms. All proofs are computer verified and the computational representation of the theory is available online. |
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| Keywords: | Geospatial ontology Spatio-temporal ontology Qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning Interoperability Axiomatic theories |
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