Knowledge of places: An ontological analysis of the social level in the city

Abstract

The present paper proposes to enrich standard methodologies to interpret places with new information coming from other forms of place interpretation and description. We develop this proposal investigating geographical places since these are complex spatial environments well suited for the exploitation of different paradigms. The new approach we explore is based on ontological analysis. This approach, we believe, is very useful to integrate a cognitive stand within the traditional analytical and organizational views of complex spatial environments, in particular aiming to facilitate decision-making processes. The overall rationale of this paper is twofold. From the one hand, the introduction of ontological levels is rather useful for organizing the modeling of complex systems. On the other hand, while these levels are informative, our understanding of space cannot be reduced to the ontological elements per se since they lack the contextual perspective. Therefore, deeper studies and research are needed to develop formal frameworks that really integrate standard and ontological methodologies for general modeling purposes.