SOWL: A framework for handling spatio-temporal information in OWL 2.0

Abstract

We propose SOWL, an ontology for representing and reasoning over spatio-temporal information in OWL. Building upon well established standards of the semantic web (OWL 2.0, SWRL) SOWL enables representation of static as well as of dynamic information based on the 4D-fluents (or, equivalently, on the N-ary) approach. Both RCC-8 topological and cone-shaped directional relations are integrated in SOWL. Representing both qualitative temporal and spatial information (i.e., information whose temporal or spatial extents are unknown such as "left-of" for spatial and "before" for temporal relations) in addition to quantitative information (i.e., where temporal and spatial information is defined precisely) is a distinctive feature of SOWL. The SOWL reasoner is capable of inferring new relations and checking their consistency, while retaining soundness, completeness, and tractability over the supported sets of relations. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.