Use of affordances in geospatial ontologies

Abstract

Affordances are important constituents of our knowledge about geospatial artifacts. They should be seen as complementary to the knowledge of functions of various agents in respect to the geospatial artifacts. While functions combine to form complex activities in which agents can participate, affordances can be nested, or sequential in nature. We extract nested and sequential affordances based on statistical analysis of formal texts to construct hierarchies. Our approach considers affordances of classes of artifacts and thus is relevant to specifications of ontologies. The use of such affordances in function based ontologies is demonstrated using a Road ontology example. The implication of this work can be seen in the building of ontologies used by a robotic vehicle for autonomous driving. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.