“Ontological Foundations for Geographic Information Science” has been recognized as an emerging research theme by the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science. Ontology in the philosophical sense is an enterprise that cross-cuts all branches of science and information systems. This is because all sciences and information systems deal, in some way and at some level of generality, with reality. Geospatial cognition and geographic information systems each relates in its own way to the spatial aspects of the real world, more specifically to the domain of objects and processes located in large spatial regions on or near the surface of the Earth. The task of ontology building does not focus on the design of specific algorithms and data structures that would allow implementation and coding of geospatial information and processes. The ontology of the geospatial domain will define taxonomies of the different types of geographic objects, fields, spatial relations, and processes.
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