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I would like to perform qualitative spatial knowledge representation for a set of objects. Actually there is a scene including a set of objects (2D or 3D simple cubic objects) that can be moved or replaced. I can extract the position, boundary, orientation,... of each individual object. I would like to use RCC (Region Connection Calculus) and qualitative spatial-temporal relationship between objects. It needs an ontology and a software for defining the ontology. I can use Protege but is there an off-the-shelf ontology that can be used in such case, or I have to write it myself?

I have already checked this Q&A.

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NKN
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  • This is an interesting question, but unfortunately, "**Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow **as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it." You might have better luck at answers.semanticweb.com, where resource requests are bit more on-topic. – Joshua Taylor Aug 08 '14 at 14:36
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    A Google search for [`allen primitives spatial owl ontology`](https://www.google.com/search?q=allen+primitives+spatial+owl+ontology) got me to http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/ontologies/DLP_397.owl which lead me to [An Ontology of spatial relations](http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it/ontologies/SpatialRelations.owl#) that could be helpful. – Joshua Taylor Aug 08 '14 at 15:14
  • I will take a look @JoshuaTaylor, thanks a lot. I am also checking the http://answers.semanticweb.com/. – NKN Aug 08 '14 at 15:30
  • Note also that qualitative spatial reasoning in OWL/DL is also subject to possible logic extensions. You might want to start [A Review of Approaches for Representing RCC8 in OWL](http://people.few.eur.nl/fhogenboom/papers/sac10-rcc8.pdf) – dhke Mar 31 '15 at 19:05

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If you just need to represent RCC relations, then you can give each relation an IRI (31 relations in RCC5, 255 relations in RCC8) and use them.

If you are interested in reasoning, than it's more complicated. There's no straightforward solution that would allow for complete reasoning. Here's why. If you use object properties to encode base relations of RCC, which seems to be the natural way of doing it, then you won't be able to encode disjunctive relations, since OWL does not allow disjunctions of object properties. Using classes also has a drawback, because you won't be able to specify inverses.

A solution is proposed in this paper, which is to use OWL with rules (SWRL). This is a bit complicated though, because you need to run a special algorithm (described in the paper) to convert RCC-assertions into OWL axioms and SWRL rules.

"A disadvantage of this approach is the additional complexity induced by the process of reification, which causes the creation of n^2 instances of spatial relations for n geographic objects. Thus, a reasoner that would be optimized for executing SWRL rules involving many instances would be required. However, the interest of our proposal is twofold. On the one hand, we have demonstrated the feasibility of the implementation based on OWL and SWRL, of a complete reasoning for calculating the composition table of the RCC8 relationships and its transitive closure."

Armen Inants
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GeoSPARQL is mandatory and quite full describing RCC, DE-9IM, ... ! It also provides built-ins topologic reasoning functions (PREFIX geof). Those are based on FILTER in SPARQL which call external Java functions. See the documentation for more informations.

GraphDB have such a plugin implementing GeoSPARQL built-ins.

Link to the OpenGeospatial documentation

Gilles-Antoine Nys
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