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Towards Spatial Reasoning in the Semantic Web: A Hybrid Knowledge Representation System Architecture

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The European Information Society

Abstract

Environmental databases store a wide variety of data from heterogeneous sources which are described with domain-specific terminologies and refer to distinct locations. In order to make them accessible also to non-expert users, terminological concepts and spatial relations must be represented in a way that they can be exploited for searches. In this paper we propose a hybrid knowledge representation system architecture which integrates terminological and spatial aspects of the application domain and provides support for reasoning with RCC, a well-known calculus for spatial reasoning, and the Semantic Web’s ontology language OWL. Our approach is motivated by the observation that RCC cannot be expressed in OWL without a major revision of the latter. Issues of upholding consistency of the knowledge base in view of an evolving ontology and of computational complexity are discussed.

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Grütter, R., Bauer-Messmer, B. (2007). Towards Spatial Reasoning in the Semantic Web: A Hybrid Knowledge Representation System Architecture. In: Fabrikant, S.I., Wachowicz, M. (eds) The European Information Society. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72385-1_21

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