Place facets: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Place is a central concept in geography and a topic of interest in the social sciences, urban planning, architecture, and most recently in information science. The notion of place has therefore been studied with different foci of interest. Consequently, heterogeneous terminologies, conceptualizations, models, and ontologies have been proposed to capture this elusive concept. Yet these studies complement each other. Utilizing the concept of place facet as a particular type of information about place, in this review paper we bridge these multidisciplinary studies about place. We collect the different facets of place introduced in the literature and synthesize place characteristics by categorizing the identified facets. Finally, we discuss future directions for place-related research.

Operationalizing places in GIScience: A review

“…Hamzei et al. (2020) identified more than 100 facets that the construct of place was attributed to in the literature, demonstrating and describing the existence of functional, emotive, spatial, and linguistic aspects of the concept throughout various disciplines. While these rich characterizations can ultimately aid context‐specific formal descriptions of the construct, the countless dimensions that places can embed might hinder its generalized formalizations and further operationalization.…”

“…The term platial as an adjective seems to have been first used by Casey (1993) in the context of environmental philosophy, whereas in the GIScience literature scholars have employed both platial and placial to designate place‐based concepts and methods (Cho & Yuan, 2019; Wagner, Zipf, & Westerholt, 2020). Nonetheless, the platial stream of research in GIScience is still fragmented since the frameworks utilized to formalize, operationalize, and model platial concepts are grounded in different theoretical and methodological foundations, which in turn are designed to answer specific research questions (Hamzei, Winter, & Tomko, 2020; Purves, Winter, & Kuhn, 2019).…”

“…In the same year, Hamzei et al. (2020) conducted a review to identify the numerous facets and terminologies to which place has been attributed in GIScience, geography, social sciences, and environmental psychology. More recently, Wagner et al.…”

The semantics of place-related questions

“…Let us call the essential properties of places facets, using a term from facet theory [3] as one of multiple conceptual frameworks to describe aspects, properties, or characteristics of things-here of places. Based on a systematic literature review, Hamzei et al [12] have collected more than one hundred place facets and categorized them in a hierarchy which could be considered an excerpt of a geographic domain ontology. While a literature review can never be exhaustive, it can at least reduce personal bias.…”

Neural factoid geospatial question answering

“…Geospatial semantics is a broad area of research that focuses on understanding and formalizing geographic content [30]. Hu [30] identified six major research areas contributing to geospatial semantics through a systematic literature review: (1) semantic interoperability and ontologies, focused on identifying geospatial concepts to increase interoperability of geospatial data and services [31,39]; (2) digital gazetteers, that use geospatial ontologies to label geospatial objects and events with spatial and non-spatial properties and relations [21]; (3) geographic information retrieval, which focuses on extracting geospatial semantics from Web queries and retrieving content through semantic matching [35,41]; (4) geospatial linked data, which formally captures spatial objects and their relationships to establish spatially-aware knowledge bases [34]; (5) place semantics, which is a component of geospatial semantics and aimed at formalizing the notion of place [26,59]; and (6) qualitative reasoning over cognitive geographic concepts, to provide the ability to capture and reason over human qualitative spatial knowledge [17].…”