Even with much activity over the past decade, including organized efforts on both sides of the Atlantic, the representation of both space and time in digital databases is still problematic and functional space-time systems have not gone beyond the limited prototype stage. Why is this the case? Why did it take twenty years from the ®rst GIS for the for representation and analysis in the temporal, as well as the spatial dimension, to begin? I explore the answers to these questions by giving a historical overview of the development of space-time representation in the geographic information systems and database communities and a review of the most recent research. Within the context of this perspective, I also question what seems to be a spirit of self-accusation in which the lack of functional space-time systems has been discussed in the literature and in meetings of GIS researchers. I close by offering my own interpretation of current research issues on space-time data models and languages.

. Sound engineering approaches to user interface design require the formalization of key interaction concepts, one of them being metaphor. Work on interface metaphors has, however, been largely non-formal so far. The few existing formal theories of metaphor have been developed in the context of natural language understanding, learning, or reasoning. We propose to formalize interface metaphors by algebraic specifications. This approach provides a comprehensive formalization for the essential aspects of metaphorical user interfaces. Specifically, metaphor domains are being formalized by algebras, metaphorical mappings by morphisms, and image-schemas by categories. The paper explains these concepts and the approach, using examples of spatial and spatializing metaphors. 1. Introduction Metaphor pervades communication. Metaphorical thought, action, and language are not only essential to interpersonal communication [Lakoff and Johnson 1980], but to human-computer communication as well. Sinc...

The article discusses claims that conceptual structure is in some part metaphorical, as identified by verbal metaphors like LOVE IS A JOURNEY. Two main interpretations of this view are discussed. In the first, a target domain is not explicitly represented but is instead understood through reference to a different domain. For example, rather than a detailed concept of love per se, one could make reference to the concept of a journey. In the second interpretation, there is a separate representation of love, but the content of that representation is influenced by the metaphor such that the love concept takes on the same structure as the journey concept. It is argued that the first interpretation is not fully coherent. The second interpretation is a possible theory of mental representation, but the article raises a number of empirical and theoretical problems for it. It is concluded that many of the data cited as evidence for metaphoric representations can be accounted for by structural similarity between domains. 1.

This report is intended as a companion to another report, Asymmetry and Reverse Transfers in Metaphor, [Barnden et al., 2002]. In that report, it is argued that the transfer of information and other effects from the tenor or target domain to the vehicle or source domain plays a highly important, albeit subsidiary, role in metaphor understanding; the main transfer in metaphor understanding goes from source to target. Furthermore, it is claimed that the importance of this type of transfer has been underestimated or overlooked entirely, hidden from detailed study by a confusion between different notions of direction and asymmetry in metaphor that one finds in the literature. However, the latter report, whilst it refers to an AI program for metaphorical reasoning called ATT-Meta, which implements target to source (and source to target) transfers, does not report any results from a simulation. It does not give a detailed listing of the rules used in illustrative discourse examples exemplifying the various types of reverse transfer, and it does not give a step-by-step account of ATT-Meta’s reasoning as it processes the different examples. This report provides enough detail of the ATT-Meta system to understand its approach to metaphorical reasoning, and it lists the rules and shows the reasoning involved in processing the examples. 0

We describe ONIONS, a methodology for integrating ontologically-heterogeneous taxonomic knowledge and its current application to medical domain. Some clarification is given of our intended meaning of ontology and related notions, then main problems of ontology design are addressed, with a short comparison with alternative approaches. The methodology is described as a sequence of phases. The top-level of the current integrated ontology of heterogeneous medical taxonomies is presented in an order-sorted logic. ONIONS includes no claim of global objectivity (it performs an integration of explicit ---or explicited--- ontologies of given taxonomic sources), but provides a feasible solution to the problems of modelling stopover and cognitive basicality. ONIONS has been defined in order to be applied to sources within the same domain, nevertheless it has been applied to a very wide and inherently heterogeneous domain like medicine, so complex that it can be considered in itself an integration of subdomains. 1.

We present and evaluate an approach to the reasoning needed to handle a broad class of metaphorical ut-terances, and a computer program (ATT-Meta) partially implementing and further specifying that approach. The approach emanates from artificial intelligence but is offered also for consideration by cognitive scien-tists generally. The utterances of interest are ones that (a) rest on conceptual metaphors that are familiar to the understander but (b) transcend the mappings in the conceptual metaphors by using concepts not han-dled by the mappings. Our approach advocates possibly-extensive inferencing in the terms of the source (vehicle) domains of the conceptual metaphors, while avoiding as far as possible the extension of the map-pings to deal with the concepts they do not handle. The general approach is similar in flavor to those of a small number of other metaphor researchers, but we provide a more extensive analysis, additional principles and a more thorough-going implementation. The approach contains a number of “view-neutral mapping adjuncts, ” which are default mapping principles that enable important source-domain aspects to be mapped to the target domain, independently of which specific metaphorical views are in play. Many discussions of metaphor appear to assume that such mapping actions occur, but rarely address them systematically and explicitly. In addition, in the approach, a conceptual metaphor can consist not only of a between-domain mapping but also of special, ancillary assumptions that serve to enrich the source domain with specific de-tails needed by the metaphors. The implemented system supports ancillary assumptions but currently only has a preliminary handling of view-neutral mapping adjuncts. 2 1

Metaphors are powerful means to design and learn user interfaces for computer systems. This paper discusses metaphors for display operations in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Specifically, the metaphor DISPLAYS ARE VIEWS is proposed and analyzed. It is presented as an antithesis to the metaphor DISPLAYS ARE MAPS, which is consciously or unconsciously adopted by designers and users of most GIS interfaces. Displays are understood here as graphic screen presentations of geographic space, maps as static (paper) maps and views as visual fields, containing what humans see in a given situation. The major advantage of the visual field as a metaphor source is that it naturally accommodates scale changes. Thus, analyzing its structure also sheds new light on the generalization problem for displays. 1. Introduction 1 Kuhn, W. 1991. "Are Displays Maps or Views?". In Proceedings of ACSM-ASPRS AutoCarto 10, in Baltimore, Maryland, Published by American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, Vol...

ONIONS helps terminological ontology construction from existing, contextually heterogeneous terminologies. It is a methodology for integrating the context-dependent conceptualizations underlying conceptually heterogeneous terminology systems. We describe an application of this methodology to the medical domain with an example extracted from the UMLS system. We also give a short description of the current ontology library produced by means of ONIONS, and of its metaontology.

This chapter has three objectives. First, it argues in favor of more rigorous definitions of the term phraseologism on the basis of six dimensions and exemplifies them for several different kinds of phraseologisms. Second, it reviews the ways in which phraseologisms as defined here have figured in three different linguistic approaches, generative linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and corpus linguistics. Finally, it discusses a few shortcomings in the identification of phraseologisms and points to relevant work to overcome these shortcomings. Key words

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