Geospatial semantics: beyond ontologies, towards an enactive approach

TL;DR

This paper advocates for an enactive, context-dependent approach to geospatial semantics, moving beyond traditional ontologies and symbolic methods to address their limitations.

Contribution

It introduces an enactive perspective on geospatial semantics and proposes SCOP as a formalism suitable for modeling context-dependent meanings.

Findings

Highlights limitations of ontologies in geospatial semantics

Proposes enactive approach emphasizing emergent meaning

Suggests SCOP formalism for contextual concept modeling

Abstract

Current approaches to semantics in the geospatial domain are mainly based on ontologies, but ontologies, since continue to build entirely on the symbolic methodology, suffers from the classical problems, e.g. the symbol grounding problem, affecting representational theories. We claim for an enactive approach to semantics, where meaning is considered to be an emergent feature arising context-dependently in action. Since representational theories are unable to deal with context, a new formalism is required toward a contextual theory of concepts. SCOP is considered a promising formalism in this sense and is briefly described.