RE: Spatial datatypes and RDF/OWL

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your reply. It would be nice to generalise this to other
spatial datatypes like lines and polygons - but certainly would be
non-trivial I'm sure. 

Has much work been done on spatial indexing of RDF?

John

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Harris [mailto:swh@ecs.soton.ac.uk] 
Sent: 14 April 2008 11:39
To: John Goodwin
Cc: semantic-web@w3.org
Subject: Re: Spatial datatypes and RDF/OWL

Hi John,

Sure, that's how people use geo:lat and geo:log now, eg.

   <geo:Point>
     <geo:lat>55.701</geo:lat>
     <geo:long>12.552</geo:long>
   </geo:Point>

and then query on the bNode of the Point.

It requires a fair amount of smarts in the RDF engine's index, and/or  
the FILTER function, but it's a well understood problem.

- Steve

On 14 Apr 2008, at 11:12, John Goodwin wrote:
> 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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.


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Thank you for your cooperation.

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Received on Monday, 14 April 2008 10:44:19 UTC