Some Practical Issues in Building a Hybrid Deductive Geographic Information System with a DL Component.
Michael Wessel · 2003
We report about some preliminary issues from the DFG project “Description Logics and Spatial Reasoning ” (“DLS”, DFG Grant NE 279/8-1), one of whose goals is to develop a prototypical deductive hybrid Geographic Information System (GIS) with a DL-component. In this paper we discuss the multi-dimensionality of the space of design decisions from a software engineering perspective. In order to support appropriate representation of spatial and thematic aspects and, considering the different aspects of the geographic data, querying the GIS in a uniform way, we are developing a hybrid representation and reasoning framework, offering support for different description languages (not necessarily being description logics). In order to be applicable to a wide range of representation and reasoning tasks, the exploited description languages are not fixed, but exchangeable. The paper sketches our vision of a deductive GIS and we evaluate how standard description logic systems can be of value in this setting. We also introduce a class of spatio-thematic conjunctive queries which is useful in our setting here and argue that query satisfiability and containment are decidable. 1