Thoughts on Reid & Sieber, 2019 ‘s article

In this article, the authors argue that conventional geospatial ontology in GIScience often seeks to reach universality and interoperability, which could potentially lead to assimilation of indigenous culture. They proposed that some more inclusive and participatory approaches, such as hermeneutics and heuristics, should be applied when developing geospatial ontologies.

While I strongly agree with the authors’ opinion that the indigenous knowledge should have a place in ontologies, it is still unclear to me, how and how much indigenous knowledge we should engage when developing ontologies?  Do we engage all of the indigenous ontology or only a part of them? If we include all of them, would we still be able to achieve the interoperability in ontologies? For example, the place-based multinaturalist approach proposed in the article seems to support the idea that we should not leave out any indigenous culture and there is no universality, but to me, on the other hand, this means that we can hardly achieve interoperability. On the contrary, if we include only a part of them, who gets to decide what to include? Would it be the scientists or the indigenous people?

In my perspective, the development of ontologies or the seek for interoperability per se is more or less assimilation of indigenous knowledge, regardless of what approach we used. The approaches proposed by the article might contribute to less/slower assimilation of indigenous culture, but as long as the development of ontologies is led by the majority (which I assume most of the time it is?), indigenous culture would always be underrepresented. I couldn’t see any way that interoperability and the full engagement of indigenous culture in ontologies could me mutually achieved.


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