Reasoning with Place Information on the Linked Data Web

摘要

The Linked Data Web (LDW) is an evolution of the traditional Web from a global information space of linked documents to one where both documents and data are linked. A significant amount of geographic information about places are currently being published on this LDW. These are used to qualify the location of other types of datasets. This paper examines the limitations in the nature of location representation in some typical examples of these Resource Description Framework (RDF) resources, primarily resulting from the simplified geometric representation of location and the incomplete and random use of spatial relationships to link place information. The paper proposes a qualitative model of place location that enforces an ordered representation of relative spatial relationships between places. The model facilitates the application of qualitative spatial reasoning on places to extract a potentially large percentage of implicit links between place resources, thus allowing place information to be linked and to be explored more fully and more consistently than what is currently possible. The paper describes the model and presents experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of the model on realistic examples of geospatial RDF resources.