Designing a comprehensive spatio-temporal ontology to track changes in geographical entities.

CYRIL CARRÉ | 2020

Summary 

Over the past thirty years, the world of geographical science has shown a growing interest in the representation of geographical dynamics. These dynamics refer to spatio-temporal processes that link changes to the phenomena that produce them. As a result, the modeling of geographical dynamics takes into account objects, people, phenomena, and places, as well as their interactions.

Due to the complexity of the data involved, modeling geographical dynamics is quite challenging. A large number of spatio-temporal models already exist, and they are extremely disparate. Some models are dependent on the structure of the data itself, while others are conceptual frameworks without implementation. Moreover, each model is generally dedicated to a particular aspect of evolution: some focus on the nature of the geographical object, others on events affecting the objects, or on identity.

During our previous research on the history of cities and buildings (Carré et al. 2013, Pfeiffer, Carré, Delfosse, and Billen 2013), we did not find models capable of meeting our needs. In this urban context, spatio-temporal phenomena are represented using multisource and heterogeneous data. In addition, we believe that it is possible to improve certain aspects that are already supported, such as identity management and temporality.

Thus, our research builds on existing spatiotemporal models, aiming to develop a comprehensive model to meet all the requirements we have identified. We are particularly focused on modelling the evolution of geographical objects.

To test our model with practical cases, we have chosen the domain of urban archaeology as our application framework. This field presents the advantage of having highly heterogeneous data, requiring the consideration of uncertainties, as well as the perspectives of various specialists.

Summary 

Subsequently, the ontology developed in this thesis was applied to other domains. For instance, it has been used for identity management in the context of ship tracking in maritime environments.

Links 

• Carré C., Hamdani Y., Pyramidal Framework: Guidance for the Next Generation of GIS Spatial-Temporal Models, ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 2021 https://hdl.handle.net/2268/258358 
• Carré C., Conception d'une ontologie spatio-temporelle dédiée au suivi de l'évolution des objets géographiques [Thèse de doctorat, Université de Liège], Liège, Belgique, 2020 https://hdl.handle.net/2268/245248 
• Pfeiffer M., Carré C., Delfosse V., Hallot P., Billen R., Virtual Leodium: From an historical 3D city scale model to an archaeological information system, ISPRS Annals - Volume II-5/W1, Strasbourg, France, 2013 http://hdl.handle.net/2268/157663