Universality, language-variability and individuality: Defining linguistic building blocks for spatial relations

Abstract

Most approaches to the description of spatial relations for use in spatial querying attempt to describe a set of spatial relations that are universally understood by users. While this method has proved successful for expert users of geographic information, it is less useful for non-experts. Furthermore, while some work has implied the universal nature of spatial relations, a large amount of linguistic evidence shows that many spatial relations vary fundamentally across languages. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a body of linguistic research that has identified the few specific spatial relations that are universal across languages. We show how these spatial relations can be used to describe a range of more complex spatial relations, including some from non-Indo-European languages that cannot readily be described with the usual spatial operators. Thus we propose that NSM is a tool that may be useful for the development of the next generation of spatial querying tools, supporting multilingual environments with widely differing ways of talking about space. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.