Spatial concepts

Abstract

The term “concept” has been defined in several ways. From the perspective of cognitive science, concepts are mental constructs about the nature of material and abstract things, and the relationships that obtain between them. The words we use in communication – and some would add in reasoning – refer to concepts, and their meanings are shared between individuals to a greater or lesser degree. There is little agreement among the philosophers, linguists, and psychologists who study the nature of concepts as to how such mental representations and lexical concepts precisely relate to language, thought, and activity. An important branch of geographic information science (GIScience) studies such ontological issues from several perspectives, motivated by the need for better analytical software, better navigational devices, and better geographical education. Spatial information theory has emerged in the past two decades as a blending of interests from researchers in many fields, including geography, cognitive psychology, computer science, and linguistics. The biennial Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) has become an important meeting ground and publication venue for this multidisciplinary community of interest. The creation of geographic information and knowledge follows from the gathering of observational data from human senses and mechanical sensors. Understanding the progression of representations involved at each stage of this process