D.: Toward a foundational ontology of the landscape

Previous research suggests that different languages and cultures recognize different (and incompatible) kinds and characteristics of landforms in the landscape (Mark and Turk 2003; Mark et al. 2007). Landscape concepts and their lexicalization also vary, due to the varied physiographic settings that influenced the evolution of the world’s languages and cultures. If it is limited to principles common to all languages and cultures, a foundational ontology of the physical landscape is likely to be quite sparse; however, research is still needed to identify the core context-independent entities and properties. This landscape ontology will clarify, constrain, and align other landscape ontological commitments. Moreover, if this is explicitly aligned with an appropriate domain-independent, upper-ontology, it will greatly facilitate interoperability and integration with the semantic web. Natural language is an important resource for gaining insight into the stable concepts and categories that people naively acquire. However, common sense categories (e.g., mountain, lake, or valley) and their instances are problematic in a universal ontology since the category definitions are context dependent, where we broadly define context to include language, culture, individual’s mental model, situation, knowledge ` system, use case, an