Appréhender le changement des catégories pour l'étude d'une dynamique spatiale sur le temps long.

Through three examples coming from long-term studies of population dynamics in France, intra and inter-urban, this paper shows that the introduction of some "a-historical" ontologies was required to implement quantitative analyses of spatial evolutions. However, we demonstrate that these ontologies are far from being neutral, and that they do not dissolve the specificity of the sources we used, but on the contrary, they constitute situated knowledge. Beyond these criticisms, the authors tend to argue that the process of construction and dialogue established around ontology is very beneficial to research, that it is a foundation for an interdisciplinary, shared and sustainable Science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]