Towards the Practical Use of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning in Geographic Information Retrieval

Geo-ontologies have a key role to play in the development of the geo-semantic Web, with regard to facilitating the search for geographical information and resources. They normally hold large amounts of geographic information and undergo a continuous process of revision and update to ensure their currency. Hence, means of ensuring their integrity are crucial and needed to allow them to serve their purpose. This paper proposes the use of qualitative spatial reasoning as a tool to support the development of a geo-ontology management system. Spatial integrity rules based on uniform and hybrid spatial reasoning are proposed for the automatic derivation of spatial relationships and for maintaining the spatial consistency of the geographic data. A framework for the representation of and reasoning over geo-ontologies is presented using the Web ontology language OWL and its associated reasoning tools. Spatial reasoning and integrity rules are represented using a spatial rule engine extension to the reasoning tools associated with OWL. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a case study showing a prototype geo-ontology and the implementation of the spatial reasoning engine is presented. This work is a step towards the realisation of a complete geo-ontology management system for the semantic Web