Integrated Coastal Zone Management’s Holistic Agency: An Ontology of Geography and GeoComputation

Coastal data and information comprise a massive and complex resource, which is vital to the practice of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM), an increasingly important application. ICZM is just as complex, but uses a holistic approach to deal with the sophistication. The application domain and its resource require a tool of matching characteristics, which is facilitated by the current wide availability of high performance computing. This paper establishes a holistic ontology for geography and GeoComputation, and in doing so forms a philosophical basis for such a tool. Finally, a short description and assessment of COAMES (COAstal Management Expert System), which has been constructed to prove this concept, was made with particular reference to two case studies. Thus, four types of holism were demonstrated: a holism of data, information and knowledge; of technology; of spatial and temporal scale; and across disciplines and institutions. COAMES uses the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to reason with uncertainty and importantly introduces the power of ignorance and integration to model the holistic approach.