Querying incomplete geospatial information in RDF

Abstract

Incomplete information has been studied in-depth in relational databases and knowledge representation. It is also an important issue in Semantic Web frameworks such as RDF, description logics, and OWL 2. In [6], we introduced RDFi, an extension of RDF for representing incomplete information using constraints. We defined a semantics for RDFi and studied SPARQL query evaluation in this framework. Given the current interest in publishing geospatial datasets as linked data (e.g., by Ordnance Survey in the UK), RDFi is an excellent framework for encoding, possibly incomplete, qualitative and quantitative geospatial information which is found in these published datasets. RDFi is also interesting because when the constraint language used can express the topological relations of RCC-8 [8], the recent OGC standard GeoSPARQL [7] for querying geospatial information expressed in RDF, becomes a special case of RDFi. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.