Toward an ontology for geomatics

GEOMATICS brings together a wide range of different communities including surveyors, geographers, planners, landscape architects, computer scientists, and others. Integrating these disciplines requires a firm understanding of the foundations shared by all of them. In the case of geomatics this is the underlying geographic domain of which each discipline targets certain specific aspects. Understanding the geographic domain means, first of all, understanding its ontology, i.e. the nature of geographic objects, the relations between them, the basic structure of space itself, and the nature of location and of spatial reference. In this paper we take a first step towards building such an ontology-based foundation of geomatics by (a) describing the major components the ontology needs to encompass; (b) by showing how these theoretical concepts can be incorporated into the structural backbone of geomatics as an interdisciplinary information producing enterprise. Since it is extremely difficult to provide such a general theoretical framework and to incorporate it into the concrete process of information production, we limit ourselves to an analysis of the GEOIDE network, which encapsulates a wide range of the features and the complexity of geomatics as a whole. Hence we treat GEOIDE as a test-bed for the relevance and the applicability of the ideas presented in this paper to the broader field.