Statistics for Spatial Data.

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity

The theory of affordances

The cultural origins of human cognition

Why are notions like semantics and ontologies suddenly getting so much attention, within and outside geospatial information communities? The main reason lies in the componentization of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) into services, which are supposed to interoperate within and across these communities. Consequently, I look at geospatial semantics in the context of semantic interoperability. The paper clarifies the relevant notion of semantics and shows what parts of geospatial information need to receive semantic specifications in order to achieve interoperability. No attempt at a survey of approaches to provide semantics is made, but a framework for solving interoperability problems is proposed in the form of semantic reference systems. Particular emphasis is put on the need and possible ways to ground geospatial semantics in physical processes and measurements.

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Geospatial semantics: why, of what, and how?

This position paper is the outcome of a joint reflection by a group of international geographic and environmental scientists from government, industry, and academia brought together by the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science, and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. It argues that the vision of Digital Earth put forward by VicePresident Al Gore 10 years ago needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the many developments in the fields of information technology, data infrastructures, and earth observation that have taken place since. It focuses the vision on the nextgeneration Digital Earth and identifies priority research areas to support this vision. The paper is offered as input for discussion among different stakeholder communities with the aim to shape research and policy over the next 5-10 years.

Next-Generation Digital Earth: A position paper from the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science

A method is proposed to derive ontologies of geographical domains from natural language texts that describe human activities. Through its textual grounding, the method addresses the issue of where to take the contents of ontologies from. Through its focus on actions afforded by domain objects, it establishes a criterion for selecting the contents. The actions are organized into a hierarchical theory of human activities in the domain. Using an analysis of the German traffic code as a case study, the paper demonstrates the informal parts of the process to derive such ontologies.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13658810110061180

Ontologies in support of activities in geographical space

(2003). Semantic reference systems. International Journal of Geographical Information Science: Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 405-409.

Werner Kuhn

Papers

Geospatial semantics: why, of what, and how?

Next-Generation Digital Earth: A position paper from the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science

Ontologies in support of activities in geographical space

Semantic reference systems

Ontology-based discovery of geographic information services—An application in disaster management