Abstract
Spatial units often serve as reference to socioeconomic phenomena constituting what is known as spatial socioeconomic units (SSEUs). SSEUs find a wide application in geography. This chapter presents the development of an ontological framework for the systematic definition of SSEUs on the basis of their properties, and particularly the spatial ones. Special attention is paid to the most common case of SSEUs, i.e., administrative units. SSEUs defined based on this framework can be effectively compared not only at the class level but also at the instance level. Furthermore, the restructuring of SSEUs and their unification into larger ones is greatly facilitated by the proposed property-based definition.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
ADL. (2002). Alexandria digital library feature type thesaurus. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California. Retrieved from http://legacy.alexandria.ucsb.edu/gazetteer/FeatureTypes/ver070302/index.htm.
Burrough, P. A., & Frank, A. U. (Eds.). (1996). Geographic objects with indeterminate boundaries, European Science Foundation, GISdata Series, 2. London and Bristol: CRC Press, Taylor and Francis.
Couclelis, H. (1996). Typology of geographic entities with Ill-defined boundaries. In P. A. Burrough & A. U. Frank (Eds.), Geographic objects with indeterminate boundaries (pp. 45–56). London and Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis.
Dale, P. F. (1976). Cadastral surveys within the commonwealth. London: HMSO.
Dale, P. F., & McLaughlin, J. D. (1999). Land administration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Darra, A. (2009). A framework for the determination and comparison of socioeconomic units. Ph.D. thesis (in Greek), National Technical University of Athens.
Dickson, S. (2008). The power of postcodes, Simon blogs about e-government, online news and politics. Retrieved from http://puffbox.com/2008/06/23/the-power-of-postcodes/.
EUROBOUNDARIES. (2006). State of the Art of National Boundaries, Analysis and Open Issues, EuroBoundaries Project—WP2 Scope and Strategy. Retrieved from http://www.eurogeographics.org/eng/documents/EB_StateOfArt_QuestionnaireAnalysis_v14.pdf.
Fleck, M. M. (1996). The topology of boundaries. Artificial Intelligence, 80, 1–27.
Frank, A. U., Raper, J., & Cheylan, J.-P. (Eds.). (2001). Life and motion of socio-economic units (GISDATA 8). Taylor and Francis: London.
Ganter, B., & Wille, R. (1999). Formal concept analysis. Mathematical foundations. Berlin: Springer.
GAUL. (2006). The Global Administrative Unit Layers (GAUL). Retrieved from http://www.fao.org/GIEWS/ENGLISH/shortnews/GAUL1.pdf/.
GBHGIS. (2012). Administrative Units Typology, A Vision of Britain through Time, Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System, University of Portsmouth. Retrieved from http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/expertsearch#tab04.
Gruber, T. R. (1993). A translation approach to portable ontologies. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 199–220.
Hall, P. (2000). Urban renaissance/new urbanism. Journal of the American Planning Association, 66(4), 359–360.
Hansen, M. H. (Ed.). (2000). A comparative study of thirty city-state cultures: An investigation (Vol. 21). The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 636p.
Hubbard, P. (2006). City, series: Key ideas in geography. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
IBRU. (2018). Boundary links, Centre for Borders Research, International Boundaries Research Unit, Durham University. Retrieved from https://www.dur.ac.uk/ibru/resources/links/index.php?cat=55.
International Electoral Standards. (2002). Guidelines for reviewing the legal framework of elections Chapter 4. Boundary Delimitation, Districting Or Defining Boundaries Of Electoral Units, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Publications Office, SE 103 34 Stockholm, Sweden. Retrieved from http://aceproject.org/ero-en/topics/election-integrity/UNPAN016077.pdf/at_download/file
Kim, S., Iglesias-Sucasas, M., & Viollier, V. (2013). The FAO geopolitical ontology: A reference for country-based information. Journal of Agricultural & Food Information, 14(1), 50–65.
Kohonen, T. (1995). Self-organizing maps. Series in information sciences (Vol. 30, 2nd ed.). Heidelberg: Springer.
Kruskal, J. B., & Wish M. (1978). Multidimensional Scaling. Sage University Paper series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, number 07–011. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA.
Kuhn, W., & Blumenthal, B. (1996). Spatialization: Spatial metaphors for user interfaces. In A. U. Frank (Ed.), Geoinfo series, 8. Vienna, Austria: Department of Geoinformation, TU Vienna.
LILP. (2008). Defining the Region, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
López-Pellicer, F. J., Florczyk, A. J., Lacasta, J., Zarazaga-Soria, F. J., & Muro-Medrano, P. R. (2008). Administrative units, an ontological perspective. In I.-Y. Song et al. (Eds.), ER Workshops 2008, LNCS 5232 (pp. 354–363). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
MAINE.gov. (2010). School Administrative Reorganization, Maine Department of Education. Retrieved from http://www.maine.gov/education/reorg/reorgnarrative120410.pdf.
Maynard, J. (2016). Τhe Boundary Problems web site. Retrieved from http://www.boundary-problems.co.uk/boundary-problems/frontpage.html.
Monmonier, M. (2001). Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How politicians manipulate electronic maps and census data to win elections. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Protégé. (2016). A free, open-source ontology editor and framework for building intelligent systems. Protégé resource supported by grant LM007885 from the United States National Library of Medicine. Retrieved from http://protege.stanford.edu/
QVIZ. (2008). Administrative Unit Ontology Report and Schema D3.2, Deliverable IST STREP Project Number: 032518: Query and context based visualization of time-spatial cultural dynamics, Umeå University.
Raper, J., Rhind, D., & Shepherd, J. (1992). Postal codes: The new geography. Harlow: Longman.
SABE. (2004). SABE—Seamless Administrative Boundaries of Europe. Retrieved from http://www.cartographic.com/TEMP/Samples/Euro%20Global%20Map///SABE2004.PDF.
Sassen, S. (2005). The global city: Introducing a concept. Brown Journal of World Affairs, XI(2), 27–43. http://www.saskiasassen.com/pdfs/publications/the-global-city-brown.pdf.
Skupin, A., & Buttenfield, B. P. (1997). Spatial metaphors for display of information spaces. In: Proceedings, AUTO-CARTO 13, Seattle, WA, Apr. 7–10. pp. 116–125.
Smith, B. (1997). Boundaries: An essay in mereotopology. In L. E. Hahn (Ed.), The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (pp. 533–561). Chicago/La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Smith, B. (1999). Agglomerations. COSIT 1999, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Vol. 1661, pp. 267–282). Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Smith, B., & Varzi, A. (1997). The formal ontology of boundaries. The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy, 5.
Smith, B., & Varzi, A. (2000). Fiat and bona fide boundaries. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60(2), 401–420.
STATCAN. (2007). Census metropolitan area (CMA) and census agglomeration (CA), Statistics Canada. Retrieved from http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/ref/dict/geo009-eng.cfm.
Weintraub, R. (2004). On sharp boundaries for vague terms. Synthese, 138(2), 233–245.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Darra, A., Kavouras, M. (2019). An Ontological Framework for Spatial Socioeconomic Units. In: Briassoulis, H., Kavroudakis, D., Soulakellis, N. (eds) The Practice of Spatial Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89806-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89806-3_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89805-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89806-3
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)