Research On Spatial Relation Ontology Description And Reasoning Mechanism

GIS software could only express few spatial relations at the present time, so the in-depthresearch on spatial relation is the base of realizing GIS spatial reasoning. The modern researchon spatial relation lacks layer concepts and can’t express sort relations fully, which goes againstthe sharing and reuse of the spatial relation knowledge. The paper researches spatial relationthrough absorbing ontology theory, which accords with people’s commonsense spacerecognition. The research on spatial relation reasoning mechanism helps to the reasoning abilityof GIS and resolves the semantics heterogeneity problems in the process of spatial reasoning.The final aim is to realize the geographic information sharing and interoperability.The main contents of the paper are as follows:1. The analysis of research status. The paper discusses the background and researchsignificance of spatial relation ontology description and reasoning. The paper analyses theexistent problems on the base of summarizing research progresses at home and abroad.2. The theory and technology bases of Geo-ontology and spatial relation. The paper basesthe basic concept and connotation of Geo-ontology and spatial relation, which introduces thelogic structure and building method of Geo-ontology and discusses traditional spatial relationdescription model, reasoning methods, problems of qualitative spatial reasoning and ontologyreasoning.3. The modeling and description of spatial relation ontology. Through studying twodescription mechanisms of Geo-ontology’s spatial characteristics, the paper designs a coreframe of geographic spatial ontology and constructs a spatial relation ontology model whichaccords with commonsense space recognition, whose relations contain topologicRelation,directionRelation and distanceRelation. The paper designs the process of building spatialrelation ontology instance base. The paper selects OWL language to realize the description andexpression of spatial relation ontology. The paper builds the Geo-ontology instance base basedon region, traffic and scenery data of Henan province with TopBraid Composer and realizes theexpression of the above model.4. The reasoning mechanism of spatial relation ontology. The paper compares the ontologyspatial reasoning tools such as Jena, Jess and Racer, rule languages such as SWRL and Jenarules, then builds spatial relation compounding tables. Combing with spatial relation ontologymodel and instance base, the paper defines some spatial relation ontology reasoning rules andrealizes the rule’s SWRL description. The paper designs the reasoning frame of spatial relationontology. Finally the paper summaries the problems in the process of defining rules and offers the resolved scenario.5. The experiment antetype of spatial relation application. The paper introduces thedesigned aim and developed platform of the experiment system, designs the application ofspatial relation frame based on Geo-ontology, discusses the main modules and functionrealization of the experiment antetype system detailedly. The experiment validates the theoryand technology bases of Geo-ontology and spatial relation, which makes a stable foundation forthe next application.