Spatial Modeling and Reasoning

Existing Spatial Taxonomies

Existing KAoS Spatial Ontology:

• SpatialOntology (hyperOWL and hyperONT) - really just a collection of links to actual ontology files below
• PhysicalPlace (hyperOWL and hyperONT), see also the generic ontology of places: Place (hyperOWL and hyperONT),
• PhysicalAddress (hyperOWL and hyperONT)
• SpatialRelations (hyperOWL and hyperONT),
• SpatialAction (hyperOWL and hyperONT),

Generic Spatial Ontologies:

1. Spatial Relation - definition of spatial relation by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.
2. Spatial Relation Ontology - contains 54 terms; written as Perl Regular Expressions
3. Cyc Spatial Relations - collections, predicates and other Cyc constants that are used to represent spatial objects and relations

Geo Information Ontologies:

1. geoOntologies - MindSwap work on geographic ontologies in 2004 (no activity this year) containing;
   • geoFeatures (hyperOWL and hyperONT) - ontology specifies some key geographic feature classes as well as classes for describing their spatial characteristics
   • geoRelations (hyperOWL and hyperONT) - ontology specifies mereological, topological, distance, and direction relations
   • geoCoordinateSystems (hyperOWL and hyperONT) - ontology specifying different coordinate systems (very incomplete as yet)
2. MySQL Spatial Extensions - based on OpenGIS Geometry Model
3. SWEET - ontologies for Earth system science, developed by JPL NASA, written in OWL, contain much more then definitions of spatial relations (see full list of SWEET ontologies), of interest is space ontology (see its hyperOWL and hyperONT)
4. Drexel University ontologies for norms in OWL, including:
   • ISO 19115 standard - ISO 19115 ontology (hyperOWL and hyperONT) defines the schema required for describing geographic information and services. It provides information about the identification, the extent, the quality, the spatial and temporal schema, spatial reference, and distribution of digital geographic data.
   • ISO 19107:2003 standard - ISO 19107:2003 ontology (hyperOWL and hyperONT) specifies conceptual schemas for describing the spatial characteristics of geographic features, and a set of spatial operations consistent with these schemas. It defines standard spatial operations for use in access, query, management, processing, and data exchange of geographic information for spatial (geometric and topological) objects of up to three topological dimensions embedded in coordinate spaces of up to three axes
5. space.frot - ontology to annotating space with metadata; about building semantic models of places; about exchanging geospatial data in RDF of interest is space ontology (see its hyperOWL and hyperONT). It is very geo oriented; a lot concept related to the city environment.

Pervasive Applications Ontologies:

• SOUPA (page does not work in IE)- Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications; contains a very limited OWL ontology of spatial concepts (see its hyperOWL and hyperONT)
• COBRA - Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA) is an agent based architecture for supporting context-aware systems in smart spaces (e.g., intelligent meeting rooms, smart homes, and smart vehicles); of interest is ebiquity-geo ontology (see its hyperOWL and hyperONT)

Interim Conclusion: It seems that there is limited current activity in using OWL to represent spatial relations. Listed projects seem to loosen momentum with the beginning of this year (2005). Even them, however, would not support robotics space environment as is needed for Team VIP project scenario. They are more oriented toward Goe applications. Still, they are very useful as repositories of concepts to be selectively imported into the ontology constructed for the Team VIP project.

Spatial Reasoning - the problem of inference on properties of points or point sets in space

• geoServices - MindSwap Web Services that calculate geographic relations according to coordinates and helps describe geographic assertions in ontologies (no recent activity)
• MySQL Analyzing Spatial Information - provides a set of functions to perform various operations on spatial data: converting geometries between various formats, providing access to qualitative or quantitative properties of a geometry, describing relations between two geometries and creating new geometries from existing ones

• Java API : java.awt.goem

• Forthcoming book "The Logic of Space" - proposal for a book on all aspects of logic of space
• On Spatial Reasoning with Description Logic - Michael Wessel research
• Foundations of Spatioterminological Reasoning with Description Logic
• Qualitative Spatial Reasoning - reasoning about the spatial relations between physical objects or regions of space is of fundamental importance that must be done without precise, quantitative information about these relations. Typically, some knowledge of the topological relationships between the entities of interest may be available, along with incomplete and imprecise information about distances, directions and relative sizes; and from this partial information, useful conclusions must be drawn.
  • Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Group at the Univeristy of Leeds
  • Three-Dimensional Orientation Point Objects
  • Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: Theory and Practice Application to Robot Navigation
• Spatial Cognition - European project ended in 2000
  

Spatial Theory Research

• Spatial Ontology Working Group
• daml-spatial - mailing list archive (activity ended in 2004)
• On Spatial Ontologies - extending DL to Space
• Spatial Cognition and Computation - an Interdisciplinary Journal
• Formal ontologies for space and time - from the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science
• Spatial ontology baseline - 2004 deliverable of OntoSpace project; reviews various approaches to representing space that have been
  taken in ontology and qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. It argues that the foundation ontology needs to provide for the different perspectives that can be taken on phenomena in the world.
• OntoGeo - Geospatial Ontology Research Group in Greece a lot of publications and Web Geo-Ontology Editor and OWL Generator (Phase1) (see its hyperOWL and hyperONT)
• Intensional Spatial Relations - research from GIS Department, Keele University UK
• Naive Geography - formal models of the common-sense geographic world
• Cognitive Geography and Geographical Cognition - course material from the University at Buffalo
• National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis at the University of Maine

XML Spatial Languages (rather faded development)

• GML - the Geography Markup Language (version 2.0) is an XML based encoding standard for geographic information developed by the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC).
• Interoperable geospatial objects - MITRE project from 1999 to represent geo data using XML
• Geospatial XML - extend existing and draft OpenGIS standards to XML representation
• SpaceML - aMark-up Language for Spatial Knowledge