LETTER

Where are the spatial relationships in

the spatial ontologies?
I am responding to a paper by Sieber et al. (1) published in
PNAS. Although spatial ontology and semantic research are not
new, a fundamental scientic question has been ignored for
a long time.
According to Gruber (2), ontology is a body of formally
represented knowledge [that] is based on a conceptualization:
the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist
in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among
them (Genesereth and Nilsson, 1987; ref. 2). Although ontologies are also not limited to conservative denitions, that is,
denitions in the traditional logic sense that only introduce terminology and do not add any knowledge about the world
(Enderton, 1972; ref. 2), eventually in computer science and
articial intelligence (AI) community, the so-called relationships
only target the logical relationships between the concepts.
Indeed, besides the logic sense, the spatial relationships between spatial features are the idiosyncratic identity of GIScience.
Spatial relationships normally include such relationships of
equal, within, contain, touch, disjoin, intersect, union, exclusive,
and difference between spatial features. The scientic foundation to determine spatial relationships is computational geometry; that is to say, we cannot use logics to derive and determine
the spatial relationships.
If spatial ontology has nothing about the spatial relationships
but only deals with the conceptual matchmaking through logics,
then the disciplinary identity of spatial science is missing, although conceptual relationships are important. This problem is

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1109271108

common and not only in the paper by Sieber et al. (1). Previous
works (35) on geospatial ontology may have been problematic
as well; they all dealt with the logical relationships between
spatial concepts, but the spatial relationships between spatial
objects were ignored. Obviously, researchers forgot that ontologies are not just limited to the logic sense.
If a spatial ontology does not cover spatial relationships but is
full of logical relationships, it cannot be called a spatial ontology;
instead, it looks like a conceptual and logic game. Although
existing semantic technology may be able to handle logic rules,
unfortunately, it cannot support reasoning spatial relationships,
which are based on computational geometry, a different scientic domain from logics. To develop spatial ontology, we need
new technologies in which the key is to determine and reason the
spatial relationship by computational geometry and not just
conceptual and logical relationships.
Xuan Shi1
Center for GIS, College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of
Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332
1. Sieber RE, Wellen CC, Jin Y (2011) Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the
humanities. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108:55045509.
2. Gruber T (1992) What is an Ontology? Available at http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/
what-is-an-ontology.html. Accessed June 29, 2011.
3. Fonseca F, Egenhofer M (1999) Ontology-driven geographic information systems.
Proceedings of the Seventh Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium
on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, ed Medeiros CB (ACM, New York,
NY), pp 1419.
4. W3C (2007) W3C Geospatial Ontologies. Available at http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/
geo/XGR-geo-ont/. Accessed June 29, 2011.
5. National Science Foundation Award #0955816. Available at http://www.nsf.gov/
awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0955816&WT.z_pims_id=502112. Accessed
June 29, 2001.

Author contributions: X.S. wrote the paper.

The author declares no conict of interest.
1

E-mail: Xuan.Shi@coa.gatech.edu.

PNAS | August 16, 2011 | vol. 108 | no. 33 | E459