RE: Spatial datatypes in OWL/RDF

See this for a particular application of some of these ideas:
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/resources/215.pdf
 
I used an ontology that Harry Chen developed (SOUPA - unfortunately it's
disappeared) to try out spatial reasoning.  As I remember it it had
predicates like "inOrAround" and "within" to test the spatial
relationships of geotagged entities.
 
See here for the (now closed) W3C Geospatial Incubator Group report :
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-ont-20071023/
<http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/XGR-geo-ont-20071023/> .  They
reference an ontology developed by the Ordnance Survey for geospatial
relationships at
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology/SpatialRelations.owl
<http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology/SpatialRelations.owl> .
 
I get the impression the there has been a lot of activity in this area
but no consensus (yet) on a single ontology or vocabulary.
 
As far as integrating these concepts into SPARQL I think it's more along
the lines of a trivial engineering problem in terms of writing functions
like touches().  The non-trivial aspect is coming up with an ontology
that people would find useful.  An initial cut might be to use the
SpatialRelations ontology referenced above and develop some Jena rule
functions that would work with Jena rules and the Jena rule reasoner.
I mention Jena because it's the only tool that I know really well.  The
various SPARQL query engines should allow you to write custom functions,
I would think.  
 
Clay

________________________________

From: public-owl-dev-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-owl-dev-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of John Goodwin
Sent: Monday, April 14, 2008 6:18 AM
To: public-owl-dev@w3.org
Subject: Spatial datatypes in OWL/RDF



 

Hi all,

 

Working with spatial data it would be very useful if we could extend
RDF/OWL to include spatial datatypes. The Open Geospatial Constortium
(OGC) provides standards for spatial datatypes and these are common used
in GML file (Geographic Markup Language - the standard for exchanging
spatial data). 

 

Could  these spatial datatypes could be used in OWL and/or RDF in the
same way that current XML Schema datatypes are used (in fact one of the
early version of GML was encode in RDF). It would be nice to see spatial
extension to triples stores (in an analogous way to spatial extensions
of relational databases) that allow SPARQL queries of the form:

 

Select ?a ?b

Where

{ 

            ?a hasGeometry ?g1 .

            ?b hasGeometry ?g2 .

            FILTER (touches(g1,g2))

}

 

(find all a and b where a and b have touching geometries).

 

I'm curious to know what the issues are with this from a logical point
of view, or is it just a non-trivial engineering problem?

 

John

 

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