Action-Driven Ontologies of the Geographical Space : Beyond the Field-Object Debate

Extended Abstract Recently, the idea of ontology has been an important field of research in GIScience perspective of ontologies of geographical kinds, by including additional concepts: (a) the dynamical character of geographical entities; (b) the intentionality dimension of geographical space. The dynamical perspective is stressed by the fact that, in real life, geographical entities are continuously being transformed and new ones are being created. Even more relevant to GIS-based ontology research is th the intentionality perspective needs to be explicitly taken into account in GIS ontologies. We need to capture the semantic impact of the user's intentions, in questions such as: " Why do we represent a soils map in a certain fashion? " " Why was this set of classes used to interpret a remote sensing image? ". In this view, it is impossible, by simple enumeration, to establish a differentiation between the so-called fiat objects and bona fide objects (Smith and Mark, 1998).