This Research Initiative is concerned with the development of formal models of common-sense geographic worlds. We will focus on common-sense geographic reasoning that people perform and whose outcome makes intuitive sense to people and needs little explanation. The goal for a coordinated effort in this area is two-fold: (1) we want to get a better understanding of how people handle their environments, and (2) there is the need to incorporate naive geographic knowledge and reasoning into GISs. In a paper presented at COSIT '95, we called this topic Naive Geography (Egenhofer and Mark, 1995).
This Research Initiative is related to many previous research activities of NCGIA, especially Research Initiatives 2 ("Languages of Spatial Relations"), 10 ("Spatio-Temporal Resasoning in GIS") and 13 ("User Interfaces for GIS"). It will differ in having a much stronger emphasis on principles from Artificial Intelligence, and the Specialist Meeting will include many AI researchers.
Last updated on November 11, 1996.