Abstract: Cognitive categories in the geographic realm appear to manifest certain special features as contrasted with categories for objects at surveyable scales. We have argued that these features reflect specific ontological characteristics of geographic objects. This paper presents hypotheses as to the nature of the features mentioned, reviews previous empirical work on geographic categories, and presents the results of pilot experiments that used English-speaking subjects to test our hypotheses. Our experiments show geographic categories to be similar to their non-geographic counterparts in the ways in which they generate instances of different relative frequencies at different levels. Other tests, however, provide preliminary evidence for the existence of important differences in subjects ’ categorizations of geographic and non-geographic objects, and suggest further experimental work especially with regard to the role in cognitive categorization of different types of objectboundaries at different scales.

Researchers in the areas of human wayfinding, spatial cognition, computer science, and artificial intelligence have developed cognitively based computational models for wayfinding. These models focus primarily on learning a spatial environment and on the exploration of mental representations rather than the information needs for wayfinding. It is important to consider the information needs because people trying to find their ways in unfamiliar environments do not have a previously acquired mental representation but depend on external information. The fundamental tenet of this work is that all such information must be presented to the wayfinder at each decision point as knowledge in the world. Simulating people's wayfinding behavior in a cognitively plausible way requires the integration of structures for information perception and cognition in the underlying model. In this thesis we use a cognizing agent to simulate people's wayfinding processes in an unfamiliar building. The agent-based model is grounded in the ontology and epistemology of the agent and its environment. Both are derived from human subjects testing using an ecological approach. This leads to two tiers in the conceptual model: simulated states of the environment and simulated beliefs of the agent. The agent is modeled with state, an observation schema, wayfinding strategies, and commonsense knowledge. The wayfinding environment is modeled as a graph, where nodes represent decision points and edges represent lines of movement. The perceptual wayfinding model integrates the agent and its environment within a Sense-Plan-Act framework. It focuses on knowledge in the world to explain actions of the agent while performing a wayfinding task. We use the concepts of affordance and information to describe what k...

Abstract. Scale is of great importance to the analysis of real world phenomena, be they enduring objects or perduring processes. This paper presents a new perspective on the concept of scale by considering it within two complementary ontological views. The first, called SNAP, recognizes enduring entities or objects, the other, called SPAN, perduring entities or processes. Within the meta-theory provided by the complementary SNAP and SPAN ontologies, we apply different theories of formal ontology such as mereology and granular partitions, and ideas derived from hierarchy theory. These theories are applied to objects and processes and form the framework within which we present tentative definitions of scale, which are found to differ between the two ontologies.

and my parents. I dream of rain I dream of gardens in the desert sand I wake in pain I dream of love as time runs through my hand This desert rose Each of her veils, a secret promise This desert flower No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this And as she turns This way she moves in the logic of all my dreams This fire burns I realise that nothing’s as it seems I dream of rain I lift my gaze to empty skies above