Foundations of spatioterminological reasoning with description logics
Volker Haarslev, Carsten Lutz, Ralf Möller · 1998
This paper presents a method for reasoning about spatial objects and their qualitative spatial relationships. In contrast to existing work, which mainly focusses on reasoning about qualitative spatial relations alone, we integrate quantitative and qualitative information with terminological reasoning. For spatioterminological reasoning we present the description logic ALCRP(D) and define an appropriate concrete domain D for polygons. The theory is motivated as a basis for knowledge representation and query processing in the domain of deductive geographic information systems. 1 Introduction Qualitative relations play an important role in formal reasoning systems that can be part of, for instance, geographic information systems (GIS). In this context, inferences about spatial relations should not be considered in isolation but should be integrated with formal inferences about structural descriptions of domain objects (e.g. automatic consistency checking and classification) and infer...