Ontologies in support of activities in geographical space

Abstract A method is proposed to derive ontologies of geographical domains from natural language texts that describe human activities. Through its textual grounding, the method addresses the issue of where to take the contents of ontologies from. Through its focus on actions afforded by domain objects, it establishes a criterion for selecting the contents. The actions are organized into a hierarchical theory of human activities in the domain. Using an analysis of the German traffic code as a case study, the paper demonstrates the informal parts of the process to derive such ontologies.