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Geospatial Semantics and the Semantic Web pp 61–86Cite as

SPARQL-ST: Extending SPARQL to Support Spatiotemporal Queries

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Part of the book series: Semantic Web and Beyond ((ADSW,volume 12))

Abstract

Spatial and temporal data is plentiful on the Web, and Semantic Web technologies have the potential to make this data more accessible and more useful. Semantic Web researchers have consequently made progress towards better handling of spatial and temporal data.SPARQL, the W3C-recommended query language for RDF, does not adequately support complex spatial and temporal queries. In this work, we present the SPARQL-ST query language. SPARQL-ST is an extension of SPARQL for complex spatiotemporal queries. We present a formal syntax and semantics for SPARQL-ST. In addition, we describe a prototype implementation of SPARQL-ST and demonstrate the scalability of this implementation with a performance study using large real-world and synthetic RDF datasets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/index.html.

  2. 2.

    http://whale.wheelock.edu/whalenet-stuff/stop\_{}\#{}cover.html.

  3. 3.

    License restrictions related to publication of timing results prevent us from disclosing the name of the database vendor.

  4. 4.

    http://knoesis.wright.edu/students/mperry/sparql-st.html.

  5. 5.

    http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/bdy\_{}files.html.

  6. 6.

    http://geospatialweb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/jenaext/src/org/geospatialweb/arqext/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Professor T. K. Prasad for his helpful comments on our formalization of SPARQL-ST, and Cory Henson for his comments on a draft of this work. This work is partially funded by NSF-ITRIDM Award #0714441 (SemDIS: Discovering Complex Relationships in the Semantic Web) and by NSF Award #IIS-0842129, titled “III-SGER: Spatio-Temporal-Thematic Queries of Semantic Web Data: a Study of Expressivity and Efficiency (09/01/2008-08/31/2010)”.

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  1. Oracle, 1 Oracle Drive, Nashua, NH, 03062, USA

    Matthew Perry

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  1. Matthew Perry
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  2. Prateek Jain
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  3. Amit P. Sheth
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Correspondence to Matthew Perry .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California - Irvine, Irvine, 92697, California, USA

    Naveen Ashish

  2. Dept. Computer Science &, Engineering, Wright State University, Colonel Glenn Way 3640, Dayton, 45435-0001, Ohio, USA

    Amit P. Sheth

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Perry, M., Jain, P., Sheth, A.P. (2011). SPARQL-ST: Extending SPARQL to Support Spatiotemporal Queries. In: Ashish, N., Sheth, A. (eds) Geospatial Semantics and the Semantic Web. Semantic Web and Beyond, vol 12. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9446-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9446-2_3

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