Spatial Representation and Reasoning in Language: Ontologies and Logics of Space

Summary

The goal of this seminar was to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines to address the spatial semantics of natural language, the interface between spatial semantics and geospatial representations, and the role of ontologies in reasoning about spatial concepts in language and thought. There are five themes that were addressed in this seminar:

• Designing and reasoning with spatial ontologies;
• Representing and processing spatial information in language;
• Identifying appropriate spatial logics for linguistic expressiveness;
• Mapping and normalizing spatial representations for geospatial tasks and domains;
• Integrating temporal and spatial ontologies and logics for reasoning about motion and change.

To this end, we invited researchers from the following areas: spatial and temporal logics, qualitative reasoning, ontologies and knowledge representation, natural language processing, geographic information systems, and computational semantics. As a result of the discussion from this seminar, we expect the following milestones and agreements to emerge:

• Coordination on ontologies for space and time;
• Initial consensus on spatial representations derived from language;
• Strategies for mapping linguistically derived spatial information to GIS baseline representations.