Place Ontologies and Semantic Place Modelling

This research programme investigates the formal representation and semantic modelling of geographic place — extending beyond traditional gazetteers to capture the rich, multidimensional nature of how humans understand, experience, and interact with places. Spanning over 15 years, this work has developed ontologies and computational models that represent place affordance, qualitative spatial relationships, user perceptions, and social semantics of place.

The research addresses fundamental questions: What activities and services does a place afford? How do people qualitatively describe place location? How can we integrate formal place knowledge with vernacular understanding from social media? How can place semantics be represented on the Linked Data Web and in GIS systems?

Research Themes

Place Affordance: Modelling the human activities, services, and functions associated with geographic place types — what places enable people to do.
Qualitative Spatial Representation: Representing place location using qualitative expressions (near, north of, inside) rather than purely coordinate-based approaches.
Geo-Folksonomies: Extracting place semantics from collaborative tagging and social media, capturing vernacular and experiential views of place.
Linked Data and Knowledge Graphs: Representing place information on the Semantic Web, enabling integration and reasoning across distributed place resources.
User and Place Profiling: Building profiles of places and users from location-based social network data, supporting personalised location services.
GIS Integration: Implementing qualitative place models in Geographic Information Systems, including integration with Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS).

PhD Research Projects

Ahmed N. Makki Al-Azzawi

PhD 2011

Geographical Places as a Personalisation Element: Extracting semantically rich profiles from GPS mobility logs using place affordance — the typical human activities and services provided at certain place types.

Ehab ElGindy

PhD 2013

Extracting Place Semantics from Geo-Folksonomies: A framework for analysing geo-folksonomies and discovering place-related semantics, building place type and activity ontologies from collaborative tagging data.

Soha Ahmed Mohamed

PhD 2017

Spatiotemporal User and Place Modelling on the Geo-Social Web: User and place modelling from Location-Based Social Networks (Foursquare), combining spatial, semantic, and temporal dimensions for location recommendation.

Khalid Obaid S. Almuzaini

PhD 2017

Qualitative Modelling of Place Location on the Linked Data Web and GIS: Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning for place location, with implementations for the Linked Data Web and Qualitative GIS (QPM-QGIS).

Hanan Muhajab

PhD 2020–2024 (ongoing)

Global Place Knowledge Graphs: The Description-Location-Identification Graph (DLIG) ontology pattern for unified representation of vague and crisp place descriptions. View project →

Abdurauf M H Satoti

PhD 2021–2026 (ongoing)

A GIS-Native Framework for Qualitative Place Models: Extending QPM work with DGGS integration (H3, S2) for qualitative place creation and semantic interoperability. View project →

Key Contributions

Formal ontologies for place affordance, linking place types to human activities and services
Methods for extracting place semantics from geo-folksonomies and social media
Qualitative place models for the Linked Data Web enabling spatial reasoning
QPM-QGIS: Qualitative place modelling integrated with Geographic Information Systems
The DLIG ontology pattern for global place knowledge graphs
GIS-native frameworks with DGGS integration for qualitative place representation
User and place profiling methods for location-based social networks