This chapter reviews some of the aspects of spatial cognition and related topics that are most relevant to the advancement of geographic information science. It attempts to paint a broad picture of the field, admittedly from the author's perspective. The role of formalism in geographic information science and cognitive science deserves some special attention. Computer programs involve formal models of the phenomena that the program is modelling or representing. Spatial cognition research has often presented findings about a specific category of spatial knowledge, namely configurational knowledge. One important methodological tension is between observing natural human behaviour and its results, or performing experiments. Rigorous experimental control is seldom possible in the real world. Thus it is difficult to rule out the possibility that extraneous factors are influencing the results. Human natural language can be a particularly interesting site for studying spatial cognition.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, cognitive science was included as one of the key disciplines in the emerging multidisciplinary field of geographic information science (GIScience). One of the key proponents and popularizers of the study of human cognition as part of GIScience - and one of its major researchers - has been Andrew U. Frank. In this essay, we review the history of Andrew Frank's role as an innovator and champion for cognitive GIScience, and summarize some of his research contributions in this domain. Taken along with his contributions to other areas of GIScience, this review shows that Andrew Frank has been one of the primary figures in modern GIScience, and among its very broadest and intellectually-diverse contributors.

This article explores how toponym databases (gazetteers) can be used to examine the ethnophysiography hypothesis, which states that people from different language groups/cultures have different ways of conceptualizing landscape. Toponyms of two classes of eminences, mountain and hill, in Malaysia and Indonesia where the dominant languages are highly cognate were extracted from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) GEOnet Names Server (GNS) and analyzed using a heuristics-based geomorphometry approach. The result revealed that gunung and bukit, the main terms in Malay or Indonesian languages similar to mountain and hill in English, are used differently in the two countries: Bukit and gunung are used interchangeably for eminence features in Indonesia regardless of size (area extent), but the use of gunung is more strict for Malaysia to refer to larger eminence features. Furthermore, in Indonesia, the NGA GNS can readily be used to identify generic terms in local languages and dialects; we show that in some cases, size of eminence is distinguished with different generic terms and that spatial proximity might affect which term is used. The result suggests that NGA GNS is a promising set of data to explore ethnophysiography research questions, and can be a valuable exploratory tool for guiding detailed ethnophysiography work.

"If every object and event in the world were taken as distinct and unique-a thing in itself unrelated to anything else-our perception of the world would disintegrate into complete meaninglessness. The purpose of classification is to give order to the thing we experience." Of all the countless possible ways of dividing entities of the world into categories, why do members of a culture use some groupings and not use others? What is it about the nature of the human mind and the way that it interacts with the nature of the world that gives rise to the categories that are used?-Malt 1995

Categorization is central to abstraction from real world geographic phenomena to computational representations, and as such has been the subject of considerable research. We report on one common approach, free listing, in an outdoor setting and explore terms elicited in response to the question 'What is there for you in a landscape?'. We collected term lists, and explanations for the strategies used from 89 participants in two mountain and one parkland setting. We analyzed results not only using term frequency, but also by cognitive saliency, exploring list structures, and building aggregated networks visualizing links between terms. We observed memory search strategies, such as exploiting and switching semantic clusters in our data, with participants using for example not only the local setting to start clusters, but also memories of familiar landscapes to switch between clusters. Our results reveal that simple free listing experiments can help us understand how categories are linked, and also highlight ways in which landscapes are conceptualized.

Ontology has been proposed as a solution to the 'Tower of Babel' problem that threatens the semantic interoperability of information systems constructed independently for the same domain. In information systems research and applications, ontologies are often implemented by formalizing the meanings of words from natural languages. However, words in different natural languages sometimes subdivide the same domain of reality in terms of different conceptual categories. If the words and their associated concepts in two natural languages, or even in two terminological traditions within the same language, do not have common referents in the real world, an ontology based on word meanings will inherit the 'Tower of Babel' problem from the languages involved, rather than solve it. In this paper we present evidence from a preliminary comparison of landscape terms in English with those in the Yindjibarndi language of northwestern Australia demonstrating that this problem is not just hypothetical. Some possible solutions are suggested.

Researching Cognitive and Linguistic Aspects of Geographic Space - Las Navas then and now.- Spatial Computing - How spatial structures replace computational effort.- The Cognitive Development of the Spatial Concepts NEXT, NEAR, AWAY and FAR.- From compasses and maps to mountains and territories: Experimental results on geographic cognitive categorization.- Prospects and Challenges of Landmarks in Navigation Services.- Landmarks and a hiking ontology to support wayfinding in a national park during different seasons.- Talking about Place Where It Matters.- Many to Many Mobile Maps.- Cognitive and linguistic ideas in geographic information semantics.- Spatial Relation Predicates In Topographic Feature Semantics.- The Egenhofer-Cohn Hypothesis-or, Topological Relativity?.- Twenty Years of Topological Logic.- Reasoning on Class Relations: an Overview.- Creating perceptually salient animated displays of spatiotemporal coordination in events.- Exploring and Reasoning about Perceptual Spaces for Theatre, New Media Installations and the Performing Arts.

This article makes several contributions to research on fundamental spatial and temporal concepts: First, we set out to render the notion of fundamental concepts of space and time more precise. Second, we introduce an efficient approach for collecting behavioral data combining crowdsourcing technology, efficient experimental software tools, and an effective and comprehensive analysis methodology. Third, we present behavioral studies that allow for identifying and calibrating potential candidates of fundamental spatial concepts from a cognitive perspective. Fourth, one prominent topic in the area of spatio-temporal cognition is the influence of language on how humans conceptualize their dynamic spatial environments. We used the aforementioned framework to collect data not only from English speaking participants but also from native Chinese and Korean speakers. Our application domain are the modes of overlap proposed by Galton [13]. We are able to show that the originally proposed spatial relations of the region connection calculus and intersection models are capturing cognitively fundamental distinctions that humans make with respect to modes of overlap. While finer distinctions are formally possible, they should not be considered fundamental conceptualizations in either Chinese, Korean, or English. The results show that our framework allows for efficiently answering questions about fundamental concepts of space, time, and space-time essential for theories of spatial information.

This paper describes the results of two human-subjects experiments to test how people think about spatial relations between lines and regions. The experiments focused on a formal model of topological spatial relations called the 9-intersection. For unbranched lines and simply connected regions, this model identifies 19 different spatial relations. Subjects were presented with two or three geometrically distinct drawings of each spatial relation (40 drawings in all), with the line and the region said to be a road and a park, respectively. In the first experiment, the task was to group the drawings so that the same phrase or sentence could be used to describe every situation in each group. A few subjects differentiated all 19 relations, but most identified nine to 13 groups. Although there was a great deal of variation across subjects in the groups that were identified, the results confirm that the relations grouped by the 9-intersection model are the ones most often grouped by the subjects. No consistent l...

The vision of Linked Topographic Data is critical for the Semantic Web, since topographic data are fundamental to a wide range of geoscientific analyses and mapping of geographic phenomena. Terrain datasets are probably the most important for Linked Topographic Data. Terrain is computationally represented using a continuous field data model (2-D surfaces), but the Semantic Web needs discrete objects for assigning URIs. This prevents terrain surface datasets from being shared on the Semantic Web—which is ironical given the availability of incredibly high resolution terrain data. Surface networks, which are a topologically connected set of shape-critical points, lines, and areal districts, can be used to share information about surfaces on the Semantic Web. In this paper, we reinterpret surface network theory for Linked Topographic Data, and present two OWL ontology design patterns. Surface Network is a template pattern intended for any type of surface network. It formalizes only the topological connections between surface network elements, since formalized of the metric properties requires commitment to a domain-specific spatial ontology. Geospatial SNODP extends SNODP for metric geographic space through alignment with the GeoSPARQL geospatial ontology. It can be used to annotate any geospatial surface network, but is expected to primarily serve as a core terrain ontology for Linked Topographic Data. CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory (CIGI) & National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.

Are the contents of toponyms meaningless, as it is often claimed in linguistic literature, or can the generic parts in toponyms, such as hill in Black Hill, be used to infer landscape descriptions? We investigate this question by, firstly, linking gazetteer data with topographic characteristics, and, secondly, by conducting analysis of how the use of landscape terms might have changed over time in a historic corpus. We thus aim at answering a linguistic, and ethnophysiographic, research question through digital input data and processing. Our study area is Switzerland and our main focus is on geographic eminences, and in particular on the use of the terms Spitze, Horn and Berg. We show that most prominent generic parts in toponyms show expected topographic characteristics. However, not all generic parts strictly follow this rule, as in the case of Berg. Some generic parts have lost their meaning in standard language over time (e.g. Horn). We therefore put a cautionary note on the use of generic parts in toponyms in landscape studies, but point out that the subtle details of these differences provide rich topics for future research.