Exploring the Duality of Space and Place through Formal Geo-Concepts

Places are initially perceived through the senses, and the fidelity between these senses and their mental representations is imperfect. At the same time, it is impossible to know what platial memories a place name may evoke in the recipient. In contrast, spaces can be reasoned about, but encompass endless continua that cannot be fully comprehended. In this paper, we explore the thesis that the interplay between spaces and place representations parallels the duality between extent, the things a class ranges over, and intent, the range of descriptive qualities of a class. We discuss how a duality may manifest between spaces and representations of senses of places. In doing so, we use definitions from the mathematical basis of Formal Concept Analysis and we introduce the notion of a geo-concept, which is a matching of a space and a place representation. We conclude with a short outlook on implications and directions for future work.