Place facets: a systematic literature review

ABSTRACT Place is a central concept in geography and a topic of interest in the social sciences, urban planning, architecture, and most recently in information science. The notion of place has therefore been studied with different foci of interest. Consequently, heterogeneous terminologies, conceptualizations, models, and ontologies have been proposed to capture this elusive concept. Yet these studies complement each other. Utilizing the concept of place facet as a particular type of information about place, in this review paper we bridge these multidisciplinary studies about place. We collect the different facets of place introduced in the literature and synthesize place characteristics by categorizing the identified facets. Finally, we discuss future directions for place-related research.