This section gives a description of notions used throughout this study. Current achievements in developing action-centered ontologies are also discussed. 2.1 Ontologies In the context of information extraction and retrieval, different kinds of ontologies can be distinguished [15]: - Top-level ontologies describe very general concepts like space and time, not depending on a particular domain, - Domain ontologies and task ontologies describe the vocabulary related to a generic domain or kind of task, detailing the terms used in the top-level ontology, - Application ontologies describe the concepts that depend on the particular domain and task within a specific activity. Several investigations have been conducted to bring actions (tasks) to bear on - tologies. Among them are Chandrasekaran et al. [6] and Mizoguchi et al. [23] in the fields of AI and Knowledge Engineering. For the geospatial domain, Kuhn [21] and Raubal and Kuhn [26] have attempted to support human actions in ontologies for transportation. Acknowledging the importance of human actions in the geographic domain, a research workshop was held in 2002, bringing together experts from diff- ent disciplines to share the knowledge and work on this issue [1]. Camara [5], one of the workshop participants, has proposed that action-driven spatial ontologies are formed via category theory, for the case of emergency action plans.

InhaltsangabeContested Nature of Place: Knowledge Mapping for Resolving Ontological Distinctions Between Geographical Concepts.- Geo-Self-Organizing Map (Geo-SOM) for Building and Exploring Homogeneous Regions.- Can Relative Adjacency Contribute to Space Syntax in the Search for a Structural Logic of the City?.- Semi-automatic Ontology Alignment for Geospatial Data Integration.- Modeling Surface Hydrology Concepts with Endurance and Perdurance.- Procedure to Select the Best Dataset for a Task.- Floating-Point Filter for the Line Intersection Algorithm.- Project Lachesis: Parsing and Modeling Location Histories.- The SPIRIT Spatial Search Engine: Architecture, Ontologies and Spatial Indexing.- Comparing Exact and Approximate Spatial Auto-regression Model Solutions for Spatial Data Analysis.- 3D GIS for Geo-coding Human Activity in Micro-scale Urban Environments.- Arc_Mat, a Toolbox for Using ArcView Shape Files for Spatial Econometrics and Statistics.- A Predictive Uncertainty Model for Field-Based Survey Maps Using Generalized Linear Models.- Information Dissemination in Mobile Ad-Hoc Geosensor Networks.- Public Commons of Geographic Data: Research and Development Challenges.- Alternative Buffer Formation.- Effect of Category Aggregation on Map Comparison.- Simplifying Sets of Events by Selecting Temporal Relations.- Towards a Temporal Extension of Spatial Allocation Modeling.- Formalizing User Actions for Ontologies.- Landmarks in the Communication of Route Directions.- From Objects to Events: GEM, the Geospatial Event Model.