Research on Representation of Geographic Spatio-temporal Information and Spatio-temporal Reasoning Rules Based on Geo-ontology and SWRL

Spatial reasoning has gradually become a research hotspot in some domains such as GIS and spatio-temporal database. At present many spatio-temporal methods put forward by scholars are methods based on logic or algebra by and large, and researches on formalization representation and reasoning of geographic spatio-temporal knowledge are few. Geo-ontology researches detailed connotations and hierarchy relationships of concepts of geographic spatial information in the geoinformatics domain and offers semantic annotations of concepts. Semantic and spatio-temporal relationships can fuse into geo-ontology and form knowledge base of geo-ontology. But OWL, an ontology representation language, canpsilat describe determining and reasoning rules of spatio-temporal relationships owing on account of its limitation. At the same time SWRL can make up the deficiency of OWL, which implements the combination of Horn-like rules and OWL knowledge base by adopting highly abstract syntax to express knowledge represented by OWL ontology. This paper does a research on adopting geo-ontology to represent semantic and spatio-temporal relationships and applying SWRL to express spatio-temporal rules, which lays the solid foundation of spatio-temporal reasoning.