| |  | Ide, Nancy | Historical Ontologies read moreAbstract: Static ontologies cannot capture the relevant contextual knowledge required
for search and retrieval of historical documents because the entities in the
world and the relations among them change over time. This demands that
information represented in the ontology is temporally contextualized and that
relations among entities that are relevant during different temporal intervals
are available to support user queries. Furthermore, it is necessary to account
for the fact that the course of the ontology’s evolution and the processes that
have effected it are a part of the knowledge that should be brought to bear on
the analysis of information at any given time. This chapter outlines a model for
historical ontologies that is intended to meet these requirements. | 2007 |
| |  | Worboys, Michael | Event-oriented approaches to geographic phenomena read moreAbstract: This paper is about the information-theoretic foundations upon
which useful explanatory and predictive models of dynamic geographic
phenomena can be based. It traces the development over the last
decade or so of these foundations, from sequences of temporal snapshots,
through object life histories, to event chronicles. A crucial ontological
distinction is drawn between “things” and “happenings”, that is
between continuant and occurrent entities. Most of the work up to now
has focused on representing the evolution through time of geographic
things, whether objects or fields. This paper argues that happenings
should be upgraded to an equal status with things in dynamic geographic
representations, and suggests ways of doing this. The main
research focus of the paper is the application of an algebraic approach,
previously developed mainly in the context of computational processes,
to real-world happenings. It develops a pure process theory of space
and time, and demonstrates its applicability by providing an example
of the representation of motion of a vehicle through a region. The
paper concludes by noting some of the requirements for scaling this
approach to real-world dynamic scenarios, such as might be found, for
example, in the automation of coordination of disaster relief. | 2005 |
| |  | Galton, Antony | Processes and Events in Dynamic Geo-Networks read moreAbstract: Traditional spatial information systems hold only a single state of the ‘real world’. However, geographic phenomena have not only static but dynamic characteristics. The work described in this paper contributes to the general research effort toward a generic ontology of dynamic geographic-scale phenomena and its application to the provision of modeling, analysis, and retrieval of data in a spatio-temporal GIS. These issues are addressed in this paper with reference to dynamic geo-networks, that is, networks embedded in a (2-dimensional) geographic space. After an introductory and motivational section, the basic ontological categories of events and states are discussed. The paper develops these ideas in the context of flows in dynamic geo-networks, and goes on to discuss the possible kinds of causal relations. The paper concludes with an overview of the results and pointers to further research directions. | 2005 |
| |  | Grenon, Pierre | SNAP and SPAN: Towards Dynamic Spatial Ontology read moreAbstract: We propose a modular ontology of the dynamic features of reality. This
amounts, on the one hand, to a purely spatial ontology supporting snapshot views of the world at successive instants of time and, on the other hand, to a purely spatiotemporal ontology of change and process. We argue that dynamic spatial ontology must combine these two distinct types of inventory of the entities and relationships in reality, and we provide characterizations of spatiotemporal reasoning in the light of the interconnections between them. | 2004 |
| |  | Avery, John | dOWL: A Dynamic Ontology Language read moreAbstract: Ontologies in a web setting, particularly those used in a group context (such as a virtual community), need to be flexible
and open to changes that reflect the evolution of knowledge. OWL the ontology language of the semantic web provides
very little for facilitating the description of evolutionary changes in an ontology. We propose a dynamic web ontology
language (dOWL), an extension to OWL, which consists of a set of elements that can be used to model these
evolutionary changes in an ontology. | 2003 |