Structure, Representation and Understanding of Spatial Information

Spatial information is another form of information in contrast with text information represented with natural language. The interior structure, representation and understanding mechanism are the prerequisites to realize the capturing, managing and processing of spatial information. As many years passed, GIS has succeeded as a technology of engineering, especially in the field of data management and non-intelligent data processing. However, it is generally accepted that the further progress of GIS depends on the more concern with the spatial information itself. In this paper, based on the drawback analysis of traditional GIS theory, linguistics is introduced into GIS. The understanding paradigm of the structure and representation of spatial information in digital context, i.e. linguistic paradigm of spatial information is proposed. The linguistic characteristics of spatial data in terms of language unit, syntax and semantics are discussed, along with the influence on the aspects of GIS with special care about the intelligent data processing.