PelletSpatial: A Hybrid RCC-8 and RDF/OWL Reasoning and Query Engine

In this paper, we present PelletSpatial, a qualitative spatial reasoning engine implemented on top of Pellet. PelletSpatial provides consistency checking and query answering over spatial data represented with the Region Connection Calculus (RCC). It supports all RCC-8 relations as well as standard RDF/OWL semantic relations, both represented in RDF/OWL. As such, it can answer mixed SPARQL queries over both relation types. PelletSpatial implements two RCC reasoners: (a) A reasoner based on the semantics preserving translation of RCC relations to OWL-DL class axioms and (b) a reasoner based on the RCC composition table that implements a path-consistency algorithm. We discuss the details of two implementation approaches and focus on some of their respective advantages and disadvantages.

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