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Abstract
The need for a conceptually unifying data model for the representation of geographic phenomena is widely understood. Although some successes have been reported, progress has been slow, especially at the conceptual and logical levels of abstraction. Drawing on and combining existing successes, this article suggests the 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 that the concepts required to better represent geographic 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 an application of the conceptual framework being proposed.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Jo Wood and Peter Fisher for co-supervising the PhD work that resulted in this publication and John Sedgwick for streamlining the argument of the article. Many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
Notes
1. The ‘features’ (fleeting individuality) in the field model are not and should not be treated the same as the ‘objects’ (strong individuality) in the object model.
2. The completed design diagrams and associated Java codes can be accessed from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1292262