Landscape features, standards, and semantics in U.S. national topographic mapping databases

The objective of this paper is to examine the contrast between local, field-surveyed topographical representation and feature representation in digital, centralized databases and to clarify their ontological implications. The semantics of these two approaches are contrasted by examining the categorization of features by subject domains inherent to national topographic mapping. When comparing five USGS topographic mapping domain and feature lists, results indicate that multiple semantic meanings and ontology rules were applied to the initial digital database, but were lost as databases became more centralized at national scales, and common semantics were replaced by technological terms.