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Places in Information Science
Author(s) -
Purves Ross S.,
Winter Stephan,
Kuhn Werner
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.24194
Subject(s) - computer science , set (abstract data type) , spatial analysis , representation (politics) , information system , data science , core (optical fiber) , information science , geographic information system , information retrieval , geography , cartography , telecommunications , remote sensing , electrical engineering , engineering , politics , library science , political science , law , programming language
Human spatial concepts, such as the concept of place , are not immediately translatable to the geometric foundations of spatial databases and information systems developed over the past 50 years. These systems typically rest on the concepts of objects and fields, both bound to coordinates, as two general paradigms of geographic representation. The match between notions of place occurring in everyday where questions and the data available to answer such questions is unclear and hinders progress in place‐based information systems. This is particularly true in novel application areas such as the Digital Humanities or speech‐based human–computer interaction, but also for location‐based services. Although this shortcoming has been observed before, we approach the challenges of relating places to information system representations with a fresh view, based on a set of core concepts of spatial information. These concepts have been proposed in information science with the intent of serving human–machine spatial question asking and answering. Clarifying the relationship of the notion of place to these concepts is a significant step toward geographically intelligent systems. The main result of the article is a demonstration that the notion of place fits existing concepts of spatial information, when these are adequately exploited and combined.