Terms of Reference

  • Developing and maintaining a membership list, and a commission website for information dissemination and exchange, and organizing scholarly events.
  • Research the following areas:
    • The interfaces between natural language processing, cartography, and geographical information systems (GIS)
    • Ontology design through knowledge graphs and query-based analysis
    • Spatial semantic data infrastructures
    • Institutional aspects of semantics and ontology
    • Creating, finding, and communicating meaning
    • Linked open data and controlled vocabularies
    • Reasoning and inference axioms
  • Facilitate science and humanities community interactions to connect semantic and ontological research in academic, government, and professional areas. The influence of institutions and their cultures on ontology and semantics is a particular area of interest. One or two central projects are proposed to provide a focus for collaborative work; a workshop with resulting edited publications, such as articles, journal special issues, and book publications (e.g, in The International Journal of Cartography or Springer’s GIScience series); and education or resource building technology to advance geospatial semantics and ontology practices. The Chair and co-chair plan to organize conference sessions at ICC 2020 and 2022 and host or collaborate with conference-connected workshops. An off-site workshop of geographical proximity for its members will be organized. The commission will offer support to conferences and workshops where it is invited to do so.
  • Using the ICA Research Agenda as a broad framework, the commission will support approaches that address the complexity of growing online data repositories through ontological analysis and automated knowledge extraction of geographic information. Aspects of various ICA themes, such as generalization, visualization, society, history, and theory are areas that support strong collaboration with other commissions and working groups and groups outside the ICA. Among these are coordination with IGU Commission on Geographic Information Science, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), or other institutions represented or contacted by Commission members.
  • Organize conference sessions at ICC 2021 in the Florence ICC and subsequent ICC and GA meeting in 2023 and host a conference-connected workshop in 2020 and 2022. The commission will offer support to conferences and workshops where it is invited to do so.