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Operationalising ‘Sense of Place’ as a Cognitive Operator for Semantics in Place-Based Ontologies

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Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2005)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3693))

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Abstract

Meanings of geographic concepts have to be grounded in real world and in human commonsense to formulate semantically-enriched geographic ontologies. Cognitive concepts, such as the notion of geographic place, have been shown to be inherently vague. This vagueness results primarily due to a lack of understanding of the modifiers linking the cognitive semantics with the real world, and because of the ambiguous ontological and semantic distinctions with similar spatial concepts. In this paper, an experimental framework is developed to demonstrate that the notion of ‘sense of place’ can be operationalised as a cognitive operator to ground the meanings of place in the real world as well as in human behaviour, and for defining the ontological distinctions with other spatial and location identifiers, such as neighbourhood. The results from human subject experiments are used as a basis for extracting the key parameters associated with ‘sense of place’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Pragya Agarwal

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  1. Pragya Agarwal
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, United Kingdom

    Anthony G. Cohn

  2. Department of Geography, State University of New York at Buffalo, 105 Wilkeson Quad, 14261, Buffalo, NY, USA

    David M. Mark

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Agarwal, P. (2005). Operationalising ‘Sense of Place’ as a Cognitive Operator for Semantics in Place-Based Ontologies. In: Cohn, A.G., Mark, D.M. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3693. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11556114_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11556114_7

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