Guidance: This chapter elucidates the process of abstracting the real world from the perspective of spatial cognition. Spatial cognition falls within the domain of behavioral geography, investigating how individuals perceive the real world and encode it in their consciousness. Building upon this cognitive foundation, progressive abstraction is carried out, ultimately yielding digital spatial data, precisely the content described in the first five layers of the OpenGIS Nine-Layer Model. The chapter concludes with the spatial database model, further emphasizing this abstraction process.

The content of this chapter helps to deepen the understanding of spatial data and spatial information.

The transformation from the physical world to human conceptual models, then to the digital realm, and finally back to the physical world through human interventions, encompasses three core research domains in Geo-information Science. These correspond to: studies of geographical cognitive models, computational methods for geographical concepts, and the relationship between geographic information and society, as illustrated in Figure 2-1.

The flow of geographic information and its mapping to the three domains of Geo-information Science