Towards a Unifying Formalisation of Geographic Representation : The Object-Field Model with Uncertainty and Semantics

The need for a conceptually unifying data model for the representation of geospatial phenomena has already been acknowledged. There has been some activity in developing unifying data models for geospatial representation in digital form and some successes have been reported. Nevertheless, progress has been slow, especially at the conceptual and logical levels of abstraction of geospatial data models. Drawing on and combining existing successes, this paper suggests the unified Object-Field model with uncertainty and semantics at the conceptual and logical levels of abstraction. The logical level has been formalised in the Unified Modelling Language (UML) class diagram. It is shown than the concepts required to better represent geospatial phenomena can be derived from a single foundation that is termed the Elementary-geoParticle with associated uncertainty and semantics by means of aggregation. The town centre phenomenon is used as a proof of concept