Modeling the semantics of geographic categories through conceptual integration

Abstract

We apply the notion of conceptual integration from cognitive science to model the semantics of geographic categories. The paper shows the basic ideas, using the classical integration example of houseboats and boathouses. It extends the notion with image-schematic and affordance-based structure. A formalization in the functional language Haskell tests this approach and demonstrates how it generalizes to a powerful paradigm for building ontologies.