Towards a General Field model and its order in GIS

An interesting paper has been published in the IJGIS by Y. Liu, M.F. Goodchild, Q. Guo, Y. Tian, and L. Wu title: Towards a general field model and its order in GIS. This is very closely related with the works of Cova and Goodchild (2002) and Kjenstad (2006) and with my PhD work which has been reported in Voudouris, Wood and Fisher (2005), Voudouris, Fisher and Wood (2006), Voudouris and Marsh (2007) and Voudouris (2008) - the full PhD will be made available soon after the PhD viva examination.

Abstract
Geospatial data modelling is dominated by the distinction between continuous-
field and discrete-object conceptualizations. However, the boundary between
them is not always clear, and the field view is more fundamental in some respects
than the object view. By viewing a set of objects as an object field and unifying it
with conventional field models, a new concept, the General Field (G-Field)
model, is proposed. In this paper, the properties of G-Field models, including
domain, range, and categorization, are discussed. As a summary, a descriptive
framework for G-Field models is proposed. Then, some common geospatial
operations in geographic information systems are reconsidered from the G-Field
perspective. The geospatial operations are classified into order-increasing
operations and non-order-increasing operations, depending on changes induced
in the G-Field’s order. Generally, the order can be viewed as an indicator of the
level of information extraction of geospatial data. It is thus possible to integrate
the concept of order with a geo-workflow management system to support
geographic semantics.

The paper can be downloaded from:
http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/%7Egood/papers/451.pdf

------
Refrences
Cova, T.J. and Goodchild, M.F. (2002) Extending geographical representation to include
fields of spatial objects. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 16,
pp. 509–532.

Kjenstad, K., (2006) On the integration of object-based models and field-based models in
GIS. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 20, pp. 491–509.

Voudouris, V (2008) Geospatial Modelling and Collaborative Reasoning of Indeterminate Phenomena: The Object-Field Model with Uncertainty and Semantics. Pesented at the RGS-IBG International Conference 2008.

Voudouris, V., Marsh, S., (2007) Geovisualization and GIS: A Human Centred Approach. In Visual Languages for Interactive Computing: Definitions and Formalizations (Eds, F. Ferri), Idea Group Inc.

Voudouris, V., Fisher, P.F., Wood, J., (2006) Capturing Conceptualization Uncertainty Interactively using Object-Fields. In: Kainz, W., Reid, A., Elmes, G.(2006) (Eds). 12th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (Vienna, Austria). Springer-Verlag.

Voudouris, V., Wood, J., Fisher, P.F., (2005) Collaborative geoVisualization: Object-Field Representations with Semantic and Uncertainty Information . In: Meersman, R., Tari, Z., Herrero, P., et al (Eds).On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems OTM 2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Vol 3762, Springer, Berlin