The horizon is a widely known word that refers to the visual geographic boundary that separates t... more The horizon is a widely known word that refers to the visual geographic boundary that separates the visible parts of the Earth's surface from the invisible parts and from the sky extending above the Earth. However, it sometimes also refers to a boundary between here and away. One essence of the horizon is that it is a feature of certain images of the environment. The horizon might best be thought of as "immaterial," not capable of occupying space, which might explain why some
An ontology of geographic kinds is designed to yield a better understanding of the structure of t... more An ontology of geographic kinds is designed to yield a better understanding of the structure of the geographic world, and to support the development of geographic information systems that are conceptually sound. This paper first demonstrates that geographical objects and kinds are not just larger versions of the everyday objects and kinds previously studied in cognitive science. Geographic objects are not merely located in space, as are the manipulable objects of table-top space. Rather, they are tied intrinsically to space, and this means that their spatial boundaries are in many cases the most salient features for categorization. The ontology presented here will accordingly be based on topology (the theory of boundary, contact and separation) and on mereology (the theory of extended wholes and parts). Geographic reality comprehends mesoscopic entities, many of which are best viewed as shadows cast onto the spatial plane by human reasoning and language. Because of this, geographic ...
Abstract Two formalisms for binary topological spatial relations are compared,for their expressiv... more Abstract Two formalisms for binary topological spatial relations are compared,for their expressive power. The 4-intersection considers the two objects’ interiors and,boundaries,and,analyzes,the intersections of these four object parts for their content (i.e., emptiness and non-emptiness). The 9-intersection adds to the 4-intersection the intersections with the two objects’ complements. The major results are (1) for objects with co-dimension 0, the 4-intersection and
Several alternative strategies for defining quadtrees and related recursive tesselations over the... more Several alternative strategies for defining quadtrees and related recursive tesselations over the sphere are examined as possible bases for a global, quadtree-based geographic information system (CIS). We propose that the UTM coordinate system provides the most appropriate basis for such a CIS. The general structure of such a CIS is described.
If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a ri... more If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a rigorous evaluation of humans' cognitive ability to interpret and classify environmental features. This research, with a focus on land cover, explores the extent to which citizen science can be used to sense and measure the environment and contribute to the creation and validation of environmental data. We examine methodological differences and humans' ability to classify land cover given different information sources: a ground-based photo of a landscape versus a ground and aerial based photo of the same location. Participants are solicited from the online crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that across methods and in both ground-based, and ground and aerial based experiments, there are similar patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants across land cover classes. Understanding these patterns is critical to form a solid basis for using humans as sensors in earth observation.
If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a ri... more If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a rigorous evaluation of humans' cognitive ability to interpret and classify environmental features. This research, with a focus on land cover, explores the extent to which citizen science can be used to sense and measure the environment and contribute to the creation and validation of environmental data. We examine methodological differences and humans' ability to classify land cover given different information sources: a ground-based photo of a landscape versus a ground and aerial based photo of the same location. Participants are solicited from the online crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that across methods and in both ground-based, and ground and aerial based experiments, there are similar patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants across land cover classes. Understanding these patterns is critical to form a solid basis for using humans as sensors in earth observation.
Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, 2013
The present study is part of the general effort to explore commonsense conceptualizations of the ... more The present study is part of the general effort to explore commonsense conceptualizations of the geospatial domain in order to deal with the massive access and use of geographic information by different groups of people. The chapter focuses on the perception and cognitive categorization of geographic entities. A basic working assumption is that although the surrounding geographic world has a real structure, there are differences in the way this structure is perceived and conceptualized by different individuals. The present study builds upon a series of experiments in order to provide a comparative investigation of the influence of two factors on geographic categorization: (a) language and (b) expertise.
Landscape scenery is inherently difficult to conceptualize because of its perceptual nature. Yet ... more Landscape scenery is inherently difficult to conceptualize because of its perceptual nature. Yet landscapes are an extremely important resource for tourism and quality of life so there is a need to classify and manage landscapes. This paper shows how viewshed analysis based on the known location and direction of a photo can be used to tag a photo and this provides a method for assessing the New Zealand Landscape Classification. GIS visibility and overlay functions are combined with digital elevation data and a landscape classification to produce the tagged photos. This tool links an oblique view with multiple distance perspectives to a GIS dataset. There are complexities associated with distance perspectives and the appropriate balance of foreground and distant landscape. This paper argues that the benefits of automated tagging of landscape photos are threefold. The process of modelling landscape tags forces researchers to confront the complexity of landscape character classification. This in turn leads to improved methods for representing and classifying landscape character. Secondly, once tagging methods have been developed then people may choose to use these tools rather than to manually tag photos. Thirdly, such a tool provides the opportunity to utilize the increasingly important volunteered geographic information on the Internet for understanding landscape categories. Landscape photographs and associated tags on the Internet provide insight about landscape categories employed by the public. This could lead to the development of what is labelled "tag clouds" and a landscape "folksonomy".
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1987
Fractal concepts have attracted substantial popular attention in the past few years. The key idea... more Fractal concepts have attracted substantial popular attention in the past few years. The key ideas originated in studies of map data, and many of the applications continue to be concerned with spatial phenomena. We review the relevance of fractals to geography under three headings; the response of measure to scale, self-similarity, and the recursive subdivision of space. A fractional dimension provides a means of characterizing the effects of cartographic generalization and of predicting the behavior of estimates derived from data that are subject to spatial sampling. The self-similarity property of fractal surfaces makes them useful as initial or null hypothesis landscapes in the study of gcomorphic processes. A wide variety of spatial phenomena have been shown to be statistically sclf-similar over many scales, suggesting the importance of scale-independence as a geographic norm. I n thc third area, recursive subdivision is shown to lead to novel and efficient ways of representing spatial data in digital form and to be a property of familiar models of spatial organization. We concludc that fractals should be regarded as a significant change in conventional ways of thinking about spatial forms and as providing new and important norms and standards of spatial phenomena rather than empirically verifiable models.
This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of... more This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children's acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF.
With the increasing number of geographical image databases on the Internet, it is a very importan... more With the increasing number of geographical image databases on the Internet, it is a very important issue to know about the most relevant image databases for given user queries, in order to achieve high efficiency in retrieving the images. To address this problem, we have developed a novel system, Webview, which intelligently ranks the distributed geographical image databases based on their visual content. Our system summarizes the visual content of each database in a metadatabase, which is a collection of automatically generated image templates and statistical metadata. With the metadatabase, our system can guide the user queries toward the most relevant image databases in a distributed environment.
In their recent paper, Bradbury and Reichelt (1983) reported and interpreted fractal dimensions f... more In their recent paper, Bradbury and Reichelt (1983) reported and interpreted fractal dimensions for a coral reef. While their data collection technique is innovative and useful, their analysls procedure is incorrect. Their data allow the fractal dimens~on of the reef they studied to b e estimated at 1.13 to 1.16, not 1 9 to 2, as the authors reported. Their interpretations of unusually hlgh dimensions are thus unfounded.
This paper reviews progress on the Ethnophysiography study of the Yindjibarndi language from the ... more This paper reviews progress on the Ethnophysiography study of the Yindjibarndi language from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Concentrating on terms for water-related features, it concludes that there are significant differences to the way such features are conceptualized and spoken of in English. Brief comments regarding a similar project with the Diné (Navajo) people of Southwestern USA are provided, together with conclusions regarding Ethnophysiography.
The horizon is a widely known word that refers to the visual geographic boundary that separates t... more The horizon is a widely known word that refers to the visual geographic boundary that separates the visible parts of the Earth's surface from the invisible parts and from the sky extending above the Earth. However, it sometimes also refers to a boundary between here and away. One essence of the horizon is that it is a feature of certain images of the environment. The horizon might best be thought of as "immaterial," not capable of occupying space, which might explain why some
An ontology of geographic kinds is designed to yield a better understanding of the structure of t... more An ontology of geographic kinds is designed to yield a better understanding of the structure of the geographic world, and to support the development of geographic information systems that are conceptually sound. This paper first demonstrates that geographical objects and kinds are not just larger versions of the everyday objects and kinds previously studied in cognitive science. Geographic objects are not merely located in space, as are the manipulable objects of table-top space. Rather, they are tied intrinsically to space, and this means that their spatial boundaries are in many cases the most salient features for categorization. The ontology presented here will accordingly be based on topology (the theory of boundary, contact and separation) and on mereology (the theory of extended wholes and parts). Geographic reality comprehends mesoscopic entities, many of which are best viewed as shadows cast onto the spatial plane by human reasoning and language. Because of this, geographic ...
Abstract Two formalisms for binary topological spatial relations are compared,for their expressiv... more Abstract Two formalisms for binary topological spatial relations are compared,for their expressive power. The 4-intersection considers the two objects’ interiors and,boundaries,and,analyzes,the intersections of these four object parts for their content (i.e., emptiness and non-emptiness). The 9-intersection adds to the 4-intersection the intersections with the two objects’ complements. The major results are (1) for objects with co-dimension 0, the 4-intersection and
Several alternative strategies for defining quadtrees and related recursive tesselations over the... more Several alternative strategies for defining quadtrees and related recursive tesselations over the sphere are examined as possible bases for a global, quadtree-based geographic information system (CIS). We propose that the UTM coordinate system provides the most appropriate basis for such a CIS. The general structure of such a CIS is described.
If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a ri... more If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a rigorous evaluation of humans' cognitive ability to interpret and classify environmental features. This research, with a focus on land cover, explores the extent to which citizen science can be used to sense and measure the environment and contribute to the creation and validation of environmental data. We examine methodological differences and humans' ability to classify land cover given different information sources: a ground-based photo of a landscape versus a ground and aerial based photo of the same location. Participants are solicited from the online crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that across methods and in both ground-based, and ground and aerial based experiments, there are similar patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants across land cover classes. Understanding these patterns is critical to form a solid basis for using humans as sensors in earth observation.
If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a ri... more If citizen science is to be used in the context of environmental research, there needs to be a rigorous evaluation of humans' cognitive ability to interpret and classify environmental features. This research, with a focus on land cover, explores the extent to which citizen science can be used to sense and measure the environment and contribute to the creation and validation of environmental data. We examine methodological differences and humans' ability to classify land cover given different information sources: a ground-based photo of a landscape versus a ground and aerial based photo of the same location. Participants are solicited from the online crowdsourcing platform Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results suggest that across methods and in both ground-based, and ground and aerial based experiments, there are similar patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants across land cover classes. Understanding these patterns is critical to form a solid basis for using humans as sensors in earth observation.
Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, 2013
The present study is part of the general effort to explore commonsense conceptualizations of the ... more The present study is part of the general effort to explore commonsense conceptualizations of the geospatial domain in order to deal with the massive access and use of geographic information by different groups of people. The chapter focuses on the perception and cognitive categorization of geographic entities. A basic working assumption is that although the surrounding geographic world has a real structure, there are differences in the way this structure is perceived and conceptualized by different individuals. The present study builds upon a series of experiments in order to provide a comparative investigation of the influence of two factors on geographic categorization: (a) language and (b) expertise.
Landscape scenery is inherently difficult to conceptualize because of its perceptual nature. Yet ... more Landscape scenery is inherently difficult to conceptualize because of its perceptual nature. Yet landscapes are an extremely important resource for tourism and quality of life so there is a need to classify and manage landscapes. This paper shows how viewshed analysis based on the known location and direction of a photo can be used to tag a photo and this provides a method for assessing the New Zealand Landscape Classification. GIS visibility and overlay functions are combined with digital elevation data and a landscape classification to produce the tagged photos. This tool links an oblique view with multiple distance perspectives to a GIS dataset. There are complexities associated with distance perspectives and the appropriate balance of foreground and distant landscape. This paper argues that the benefits of automated tagging of landscape photos are threefold. The process of modelling landscape tags forces researchers to confront the complexity of landscape character classification. This in turn leads to improved methods for representing and classifying landscape character. Secondly, once tagging methods have been developed then people may choose to use these tools rather than to manually tag photos. Thirdly, such a tool provides the opportunity to utilize the increasingly important volunteered geographic information on the Internet for understanding landscape categories. Landscape photographs and associated tags on the Internet provide insight about landscape categories employed by the public. This could lead to the development of what is labelled "tag clouds" and a landscape "folksonomy".
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1987
Fractal concepts have attracted substantial popular attention in the past few years. The key idea... more Fractal concepts have attracted substantial popular attention in the past few years. The key ideas originated in studies of map data, and many of the applications continue to be concerned with spatial phenomena. We review the relevance of fractals to geography under three headings; the response of measure to scale, self-similarity, and the recursive subdivision of space. A fractional dimension provides a means of characterizing the effects of cartographic generalization and of predicting the behavior of estimates derived from data that are subject to spatial sampling. The self-similarity property of fractal surfaces makes them useful as initial or null hypothesis landscapes in the study of gcomorphic processes. A wide variety of spatial phenomena have been shown to be statistically sclf-similar over many scales, suggesting the importance of scale-independence as a geographic norm. I n thc third area, recursive subdivision is shown to lead to novel and efficient ways of representing spatial data in digital form and to be a property of familiar models of spatial organization. We concludc that fractals should be regarded as a significant change in conventional ways of thinking about spatial forms and as providing new and important norms and standards of spatial phenomena rather than empirically verifiable models.
This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of... more This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children's acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF.
With the increasing number of geographical image databases on the Internet, it is a very importan... more With the increasing number of geographical image databases on the Internet, it is a very important issue to know about the most relevant image databases for given user queries, in order to achieve high efficiency in retrieving the images. To address this problem, we have developed a novel system, Webview, which intelligently ranks the distributed geographical image databases based on their visual content. Our system summarizes the visual content of each database in a metadatabase, which is a collection of automatically generated image templates and statistical metadata. With the metadatabase, our system can guide the user queries toward the most relevant image databases in a distributed environment.
In their recent paper, Bradbury and Reichelt (1983) reported and interpreted fractal dimensions f... more In their recent paper, Bradbury and Reichelt (1983) reported and interpreted fractal dimensions for a coral reef. While their data collection technique is innovative and useful, their analysls procedure is incorrect. Their data allow the fractal dimens~on of the reef they studied to b e estimated at 1.13 to 1.16, not 1 9 to 2, as the authors reported. Their interpretations of unusually hlgh dimensions are thus unfounded.
This paper reviews progress on the Ethnophysiography study of the Yindjibarndi language from the ... more This paper reviews progress on the Ethnophysiography study of the Yindjibarndi language from the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Concentrating on terms for water-related features, it concludes that there are significant differences to the way such features are conceptualized and spoken of in English. Brief comments regarding a similar project with the Diné (Navajo) people of Southwestern USA are provided, together with conclusions regarding Ethnophysiography.
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Papers by David M Mark