“Location” discussed today in the Musil Brown Bag meeting
It is about location!
We decided to discuss foundational concepts during the next ten MUSIL Brown Bag meeting. Today we started with location. Thinking about location raised interesting questions like what is a location, what kind of things (objects yes, but what about events?) can be located at somewhere, where they can locate at, and with what kind of relationships they can be bound to that location, whether and when a location is absolute or relative, locating techniques of today and tomorrow, and so on. Moreover, all the questions about a location relate also to imprecision/uncertainty of the location.
We discussed that location is conceptually very close to that of place, but not the same. More precisely, we concluded that location is an attribute of place, i.e. an answer to the question “where a place is” (or was, or will be). Thus, we may use a spatio-temporal reference system to represent the location and then assign it to a place. It came clear that a location cannot be just a point in 4d space, but it can also be an extent in 4d space (for example a building built last year).
Adding the fourth dimension is natural, not just for locating people and vehicles, but also for defining places. For example, a place like home or a working place might be located at different locations during different times. Even cities can change their locations: a classic example is the city of Helsinki which was moved to a more optimal location in year 1640.
Finally, we came up with an application of John Sowa’s double Semiotic Triangle to place and location, see the Figure below.
