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identifier is not task of the ontology because of the inherent 
given deictic references. 
Distance aspects also have to be considered for characterizing 
spatial scenes and analyzing spatial descriptions. As a basic 
principle quantitative and qualitative descriptions of distance 
parameters have to be distinguished. Quantitative descriptions 
are based on units of lengths (meters) as well as units in time 
(minutes). According to that a quantitative description of a 
distance is always an isotropy. In contrast qualitative distance 
descriptions are terms like quite near or far away. Such 
descriptions are anisotropy because they depend on the 
observer, position, size, visibility, dominance and a lot of other 
features. Thus a quantitative representation of a qualitative 
distance can be achieved by classification with fuzzy 
membership functions (cf. Guesgen, 2002). 
5. CONCLUSION 
Information retrieval in the disaster management domain is 
based on verbally given descriptions of spatial scenes. Spatial 
scenes here are quite dynamic situations and require that 
topology, neighborhood, orientation as well as distance aspects 
are considered. For a semantically correct representation of the 
required general and context knowledge, complex structures are 
necessary, as given by ontologies. 
Such ontology provides a spatial reasoning process and makes 
different types of reasoning possible. By modeling relations 
between classes, topological relations are directly inferable. To 
amplify this type of reasoning some additional relations have to 
be identified by a spatial reasoning algorithm. Therefore the 
intersection model (IM) and the region connection calculus 
(RCC) are evaluated. Both algorithms make reasoning with 
respect to the needed set of fl R topological relations possible. 
But using the IM algorithm seems practicable because this 
algorithm is already implemented in most GIS components. 
For the evaluation of neighborhood relations also different 
methods are analyzed. The distance based definition is 
compared to a triangulation method, whereas the best method 
for representation and identification with respect to the systems 
requirement is the Delaunay triangulation. Based on object 
center points, a natural neighborhood in terms of graph theory is 
given by an edge of the connecting triangle. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
The work of Christian Lucas has been funded by the Deutsche 
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), project no. BA 686/16 
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