The focus of I-21 parallels my own dissertation research interest very closely. In fact, I see my research as bridging issues from Initiatives 17 and 21 with some Initiative 19 thrown in (especially given the recent meeting on public participation GIS). The objective of my research involves comparing representations of spatial information from GIS to the commonsense geographic concepts related to regions and boundaries that underlie stakeholders interests in contentious land use debates, and developing representations that are compatible with these concepts. As I mentioned in my position paper, the presumption of this research is that GIS representations that are not compatible with concepts that are salient to the consumers of GIS will not communicate desired information and therefore not be useful in the land use decision making process. The inability of GIS representations to model salient commonsense geographic concepts is essentially a semantic mismatch between human conceptions and the GIS models. This semantic mismatch inhibits the productive use of GIS to resolve conflicts in land use decisions.
Different contexts will involve different concepts to varying degrees. The context of land use conflicts is particularly important for my research interest. Land use conflicts often involve a conflict of meanings associated with land uses and with the land itself. For example, classic NIMBY issues often raise the specter of a hazardous or damaging land use affecting the property and well-being of homeowners. This implies that the irate homeowners are cognitively defining some area of influence around the proposed land use and some area of sensitivity around their home (their "back yard"). Implicit in this definition are feelings not only associated with protection of private property but also with control of territory in general. Perceptions of the equity of the distribution of benefits and nuisances of land uses also are significant. The conflict arises because the proposed land use raises issues of protection of territory and local concentration of nuisances for some homeowners while proponents of the land use see benefits for the larger community and compatibility with locational criteria as long as the nuisance level remains under some threshold for selected neighboring land uses. Such cases involve the implicit delineation of several types areal and boundary entities. These entities have a different characteristics and purposes and may engage a variety of spatial operations occurring such as assessments of proximity of the unwanted land use to neighboring land uses, comparisons of the area of influence of the land use to the territory of the stakeholders, and comparisons the area of benefit of the land use to the area of concentration of the nuisance residuals of the land use.
The research that I propose (and hopefully my contribution to I-21) entails formalizing the semantics of the salient geographic concepts in land use debates. The enumeration of such concepts, as begun in my position paper, is an attempt at making the "meaning" of regions and boundaries tractable and a first step formalizing the salient concepts. I will model them using semantic network techniques and formalize them algebraically. The semantic networks will be the basis of a geographic data model that can represent the concepts and the algebraic formulation will enable me to analyze the nature of the morphism between the concepts and their representation in the data model.
While I hope to contribute to the I-21 discussion and to the resulting research agenda, clearly my own work would benefit from interaction with the specialists who will be involved in initiative. I hope that participation in the opening meeting will be the beginning of a continuing process of cross-fertilization with other researchers with similar interests.