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SOWL: spatio-temporal representation, reasoning and querying over the semantic web

Petrakis Evripidis, Sotiris Batsakis

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Summary

Representing dynamic information in the form of ontologies, as well as querying and reasoning over static and dynamic ontologies are the areas of interest in this work. Building upon well established standards of the semantic Web and the 4D-fluents approach for representing the evolution of temporal information in ontologies, SOWL illustrates how spatial and spatio-temporal information and evolution in space and time can be efficiently represented in OWL. It also demonstrates how qualitative temporal and spatial relations that are common in natural language expressions (i.e., relations between time intervals like "before", "after", etc.) are represented in the ontology. Existing approaches allow for representations of only static, spatial or temporal information, but do not support combinations on the nature of information or representation of qualitative relations. Part of the proposed representation model is the SOWL (high-level) query language, which does not require users to be familiar with peculiarities of the underlying ontology representation (which can be complex) and handles ontologies similar to relational databases. A distinct feature of SOWL is the incorporation spatio-temporal reasoning in SOWL, which is capable of inferring spatio-temporal information from representations in the underlying ontology model.

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