Naive Geography

Egenhofer, M.J. and Mark, D.M. Naive Geography. in Frank, A.U. and Kuhn, W. eds. Spatial Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995, 115.

A paper about the commen-sense way people infer information about geographic space and time. It defins the notion and concepts of Naive Geography. Naive Geography is the body of knowledge that people have about the surrounding geographic world. The authors focus on common-sense reasoning about geographic space and time, also called geographic reasoning. This is not to be confused with fuzzy reasoning, which is frequently applied to dealing with imprecise information.

People explore geographic space by navigating in it, and they conceptualize it from multiple views, which are mentally put together like a jigsaw puzzle. Therefore Naive geographic reasoning may actually contain “error” and will occasionally be inconsistent. The aim of the authors is to incorporate people’s concepts about space and time to mimic human thinking.

The framework for developing Naive Geography consists of two different research methodologies:

• The development of formalism of naive geographic models fro particualr tasks or sub-problems so that programmers can implement simulations on computers
• testing and analyzing of formal models to assess how closely the formalizations match human performance.

Examples of Naive Geography are:

• The earth is flat: Trans-Atlantic air travelers often ask why the flight path goes all the way up over Greenland, rather than going straight across
• Geographic information is frequently incomplete: people complete the information intelligently or by applying default rules, frequently based on common sense
• Topoloy matter, metric refines
• Distances are asymetric: in naive geograph space, this premise is frequently violated. Distance are not only thought of a lengths of paths on the Earth’s surface, but frequently seen as a measure for how long it takes to get from one place to another

Relation to my thesis: 2 interesting concepts are geographical reasoning and fuzzy reasoning. In the first case, our reasoning of space my be contrary to objective observations made by sensor in the real, physical world. I suppose the second could be applied to our reasoning with bad geospatial information. More on that isn L. A. Zadeh, “Fuzzy Logic and its application to approximate reasoning,” Information Processing 74, pp. 591–594, 1974. Other related concept is geospatial semantics, that is the study of how humans perceive geographical concepts in their everyday life, and how to exploit this understanding to create useful computing systems to increase our productivity

Incorporating user’s “naive” concept about space and time into location-aware system is an interesting underlying issue. A design goal could be to deal with (or supporting?) user’s naive geographical knowledge in location-aware systems in case of incomplete geographic information.