Fundamentals of Geographic Engineering for Territorial Intelligence
Résumé
intelligence, actual systems of artificial intelligence are not very efficient, essentially because of a naïve
representation of space.
As spatial knowledge corresponds to conventional geometric and topological knowledge, geographic
knowledge corresponds to knowledge about geographic features in the real world even if real features can
have spatial relationships between them. In other words, spatial knowledge is based on topological,
projective and distance relations; but if applied to geographic features, one must take earth rotundity and
other characteristics (demography, physical geographic, economic geography, etc.) into account.
After a rapid presentation of spatial relations and their properties, this chapter will detail the 12
principles governing geographic knowledge. First emphasis will be given to various forms of geography
knowledge, such as located facts, geographic clusters, flows, gradients, co-location rules and topological
constraints.
Then, based on ribbon theory, spatial relations and earth rotundity, geographic relations will be defined.
For instance, let us consider two features in the real world associated with a DISJOINT relation; when
down-scaling, those objects can be associated with a TOUCHES relation. As a consequence, any reasoning
mechanism must be transformed accordingly.