Narrative Geospatial Knowledge in Ethnographies: Representation and Reasoning?

Abstract. Narrative descriptions about populated places are very com-mon in ethnographies. In old articles and books on the migration history of Taiwan aborigines, for example, narrative sentences are the norms for describing the locations of aboriginal settlements. These narratives con-stitute a form of geospatial knowledge, and there is a need to develop knowledge representation and reasoning techniques to help analyze lit-eratures, and to aid field works. In this paper, we outline the design of a formal vocabulary to represent and reason about geospatial narratives about populated places, keeping as close as possible to the phrases used in ethnographies. The vocabulary is implemented as OWL concepts and properties, and the rules for geospatial reasoning are expressed in SWRL. 1 Narrative Geospatial Knowledge In research and study about People and Place, it is necessary to acquire and ana-lyze geospatial information about populated places. Such geospatial information — the location of a settlement relative to certain geographic features and other settlements, for example — often is described in a natural language, and the de-scriptions themselves are expressed in an everyday vocabulary that is intuitive to human but difficult to process automatically. As an example, let us look at the following sentence, which is taken and translated from an ethnohistorical article about the Atayal aborigine in Taiwan: Kanaongan Settlement... is located at the right bank of Dacingshuei River, where the river meets the ocean. [17, p. 137