It is necessary to integrate the theories and methods of commonsense geographical cognition with the data model and data organization of GIS in order to fully dig the potentials of analysis and decision-supporting of GIS in different fields. It helps to make the description and organization of geographical entity more acceptable

understandable and suitable for people’s commonsense thinking methods and habits. In this paper

the commonsense cognition activities related to data model and organization of GIS is divided into three specific parts

categorization hierarchies

entity hierarchies and the detailed descriptions of geographical entities by way of analysis of geographical cognition process. On the basis of further analysis for relevant cognition activities

we create GIS Data Meta-model to guide the conceptual modeling and computational implementation. The GIS Data Meta-model not only overcomes the attribute-based defining semantics disadvantage of traditional GIS

but also realizes the semantic representation of geographical data of different levels and the representation of semantic relationships among different data through the mapping between Categorization tree and descriptions of geographical entities. It is feasible to extract the information effectively for the application of different scale’ analysis and decision-support based on the inclusion relationship of entities between upper and lower levels and the combination relationship of same level entities.