This course is focused in the ontologies of the geographic world, that are important to allow the sharing of geographic data among different communities of users. A geo-ontology provides a description of geographical entities, which can be conceptualised in two different views of the world. The field view considers spatial data to be a set of continuous distributions. The object view conceives the world as occupied by discrete, identifiable entities. Objects and fields are not merely located in space, they are tied intrinsically to space. However, to properly represent changes, it is also necessary to describe concepts that convey the dynamics of spatial phenomena. The notions of events and processes are useful to explicitly include the temporal dimension. The lectures present a general overview of the main trends in Geospatial Ontology, discussing the concepts of objects, fields and events for representation of geographical phenomena. The course also highlights the specific area of land use and land cover ontology, an area of considerable importance for geospatial ontology research.

Lecture: What is Geoinformatics?

Lecture: Topologies and QSR

• Max Egenhofer and Robert Franzosa, "Point-Set Topological Spatial Relations", International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 5 (2): 161-174, 1991.
• Max Egenhofer and John Herring, "Categorizing Binary Topological Relations Between Regions,Lines, and Points in Geographic Databases", NCGIA Report, 1994.
• Eliseo Clementini, Paolino Di Felice, Peter van Oosterom, "A small set of formal topological relationships suitable for end-user interaction". Advances in Spatial Databases, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 692:277-295, 1993.
• Anthony Cohn, Brandon Bennett, John Gooday, Nicholas Gotts,"Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning with the Region Connection Calculus". GeoInformatica, 1(3):275-316, 1997.
• Eliseo Clementini, Paolino Di Felice, "A comparison of methods for representing topological relationships", Information Sciences, 3(3):149–178, 1995.

Assignment 1: An essay on “Topological Operations on 2D Space for Geographical Applications” (firm deadline: 26 July 2016 - 9h00)

Lecture: Geographical Objects

Suggested Reading:

• Barry Smith and David Mark, Ontology and geographic kinds. Proceedings, International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Vancouver, Canada, 1998.
• Barry Smith and David Mark, "Do mountains exist? Towards an ontology of landforms". Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 30(3):411–427, 2003.
• Antony Galton, "On the ontological status of geographical boundaries". In Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild and Michael F. Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Taylor and Francis, 2003, pages 151-171.
• Edward Robinson, "Reexamining fiat, bona fide and force dynamic boundaries for geopolitical entities and their placement in DOLCE.". Applied Ontology 7.1 (2012): 93-108.

Assignment 2: An essay on “Ontology of Geographical Objects” (firm deadline: 27 July 2016 - 9h00)

Lecture: Fields

Suggested Reading:

• Helen Couclelis, "People manipulate objects (but cultivate fields): Beyond the raster-vector debate in GIS". In: Frank, A., Campari, I., Formentini, U. (eds.) Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space. LNCS, vol. 639. Springer, 1992.
• Karen Kemp, "Fields as a framework for integrating GIS and environmental process models". Transactions in GIS 1(3):219–234, 1996.
• Karine Ferreira, Gilberto Camara, Miguel Monteiro, "An algebra for spatiotemporal data: from observations to events". Transactions in GIS,18(2):253–269,2014.
• Gilberto Camara, Max Egenhofer, Karine Ferreira, Pedro Andrade, Gilberto Queiroz, Alber Sanchez, Jim Jones, Lubia Vinhas, "Fields as a Generic Type for Big Spatial Data". GIScience 2014 Conference.

Assignment 3: An essay on “Geographical Fields” (firm deadline: 28 July 2015 - 9h00)

Lecture: Describing change in geographical spaces

Suggested reading:

• Mike Worboys, Event-oriented approaches to geographic phenomena. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 19(1):1-28, 2005.
• Antony Galton, "Fields and Objects in Space, Time, and Space-time". Spatial Cognition and Computation, 4(1):39-68, 2004.
• Peter Hacker, "Events and objects in space and time". Mind 91.361 (1982): 1-19.
• Gilberto Camara, "Geographical ontologies for land use and land cover change: distinguishing continuants from occurents". Formal Ontologies and Information Systems Conference (FOIS) 2016. Annecy, France, July 2016.

Assignment 4: An essay on “Space and time in GIS” (firm deadline: 29 July 2016 - 9h00)

Lecture: A Theory of Geospatial Ontologies

Suggested reading:

• Werner Kuhn, "Core concepts of spatial information for transdisciplinary research". International Journal of Geographic Information Science vol.26(12), 2012.
• Andrew Frank, "Ontology for Spatio-temporal Databases". In Spatio-Temporal Databases: The Chorochronos Approach (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2520), edited by Manoulis Koubarakis and Timos Sellis, 9-78. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• Mike Goodchild, May Yuan, & Tom Cova, "Towards a general theory of geographic representation in GIS". International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 21(3), pp.239-260, 2007.

Assignment 5: An essay on “Core Concepts of Geoinformatics” (firm deadline: 14 August 2016 - midnight)