Spatial datatypes and RDF/OWL

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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