Narrative Geospatial Knowledge in Ethnographies: Representation and Reasoning

Narrative descriptions about populated places are very common in ethnographies. In old articles and books on the migration history of Taiwan aborigines, for example, narrative sentences are the norms for describing the locations of aboriginal settlements. These narratives constitute a form of geospatial knowledge, and there is a need to develop knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to help analyze literatures, and to aid field works. In this paper, we outline the design of a formal vocabulary to represent and reason about geospatial narratives about populated places, keeping as close as possible to the phrases used in ethnographies. The vocabulary is implemented as OWL concepts and properties, and the rules for geospatial reasoning are expressed in SWRL.

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