Using cognitive archetypes and conceptual graphs to model dynamic phenomena in spatial environments

Abstract

In this paper we propose a qualitative model to represent and reason about dynamic phenomena in a geographic space. Our model is based on linguistic cognitive archetypes, ontological definitions of geographic space and Conceptual Graphs (CGs). In a first part, we present the main concepts of the model and how we define them using CGs. In a second part, we present an overview of how this model is applied to the multiagent geosimulation domain in the context of the MAGS-COA project. Our model is original for two main reasons. First we use a linguistic approach to qualitatively model dynamic situations in a geographic environment. Second, we use CGs to represent the knowledge associated with such situations. Using CGs makes our model computationally feasible and useable to carry out spatial qualitative reasoning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.