infrastructure to communicate, understand, cooperate or: the role of semiotics in gis

Horst Kremers

P.O. Box 20 05 48

D- 13515 Berlin, Germany

 

ABSTRACT:

Contrary to the terms: transmit, receive, respond, the terms communication, understanding and cooperation bring aspects of cognition to the otherwise mere bit-shifting techniques of data processing. The description of the "social" components of information transfer has a long tradition in cartography with its branch of carto-semiotics dealing with the sign - user interrelation.

The same structuring principles can be developed for the digital world of GIS and it can be shown that the results derived apply for information systems in general.

The cognition aspects are separated into Facts, Meaning and Actions, where the descriptive and structural methods of artificial intelligence can be applied to each of these terms, leading to Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics as the basic substructures of the Semiotics of information systems in general.

Comprizing information systems as reprezentations of Fact sets together with appropriate elements of cognition (meaning and action context) leads to advanced structuring levels for design and analysis of complex interoperable components as we deal with in loosely coupled federated systems.

It is shown that the Pragmatics aspects lead to formal descriptions of Situations which become fundamental in the design, synthesis and analysis of active, agent-based geoinformation systems.