Representing Qualitative Spatial Information in OWL DL
Yarden Katz, Bernardo Cuenca Grau · 2005
The Web Ontology Language has not been designed for representing spatial information, which is often required for applications such as Spatial Databases and Geographical Information Systems. As a consequence, many existing OWL ontologies have little success in encoding spatial information. In this paper, we argue that the representation of spatial information is not a fundamental limitation of OWL. In fact, OWL-DL does provide some of the expressive power required for representation of spatial regions and their relationships. However, a direct representation is far from intuitive. In the last decade, several languages for the representation of the relations between spatial regions have been developed. Among these formalisms for qualitative spatial reasoning, the RCC-8 fragment of the Region Connection Calculus, which introduces a set of eight basic relationships between regions on the plane, has received special attention. In this paper, we outline a translation of the RCC-8 calculus into OWL-DL, by adapting some of the known results on the translation of qualitative spatial formalisms into Modal Logics. We argue that, in order to encode RCC-8, it is necessary to extend the Web Ontology Language with the ability to define reflexive roles 1. However, such an extension is straightforward in both syntax and semantics, and can be easily added to existing OWL reasoners. We argue that providing a reasonable encoding of RCC related calculi into OWL-DL is key for integrating spatial representation and reasoning features in OWL-based tools, which can be helpful for many applications.