Scope-Differentiated Geospatial Ontology (SDGO): A Geospatial Ontological Commitment Specification

Geospatial reasoning systems depend upon commitments made at multiple levels of abstraction, yet thesecommitments are frequently collapsed into a single ontological, spatial, or implementation layer. The resultis ambiguity regarding what has been declared, what may be inferred, and under what conditionsgeospatial predicates are evaluable. Building upon the Scope-Differentiated Ontological Commitment(SDOC) architecture, this specification defines a Scope-Differentiated Geospatial Ontology (SDGO): aseven-level geospatial commitment framework spanning upper-ontological, practitioner-ontological,referential, registration, predicative, continuity, and compositional commitments.SDGO does not introduce a new upper ontology. Instead, it introduces a geospatial commitmentspecification that makes explicit the commitments, dependencies, and interfaces required at and betweenscope-differentiated levels for grounded geospatial reasoning. Existing artifacts including Basic FormalOntology (BFO), GeoCells, Things in States Through Time (TST), and GeoReasoning as a Service (GRaaS)are positioned within a single commitment structure that makes their relationships explicit.The primary contribution of SDGO is a commitment map through which geospatial entities, references,predicates, and reasoning workflows become inspectable, composable, and traceable across levels ofabstraction. The specification is intended for ontology practitioners, GIS professionals, GeoAI developers,and machine-readable reasoning systems including MCP servers and retrieval-augmented AIarchitectures.