A GeoSPARQL Compliance Benchmark

Milos Jovanovik,Timo Homburg,Mirko Spasić

doi:10.3390/ijgi10070487

Abstract

GeoSPARQL is an important standard for the geospatial linked data community, given that it defines a vocabulary for representing geospatial data in RDF, defines an extension to SPARQL for processing geospatial data, and provides support for both qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning. However, what the community is missing is a comprehensive and objective way to measure the extent of GeoSPARQL support in GeoSPARQL-enabled RDF triplestores. To fill this gap, we developed the GeoSPARQL compliance benchmark. We propose a series of tests that check for the compliance of RDF triplestores with the GeoSPARQL standard, in order to test how many of the requirements outlined in the standard a tested system supports. This topic is of concern because the support of GeoSPARQL varies greatly between different triplestore implementations, and the extent of support is of great importance for different users. In order to showcase the benchmark and its applicability, we present a comparison of the benchmark results of several triplestores, providing an insight into their current GeoSPARQL support and the overall GeoSPARQL support in the geospatial linked data domain.

Highlights

The geospatial Semantic Web [1] as part of the Semantic Web [2] represents an evergrowing semantically interpreted wealth of geospatial information
GeoSPARQL compliance percentage: The percentage of compliance with the requirements of the GeoSPARQL standard. The former is straightforward—it is the number of correct answers the system provided, out of the 206 test queries. The latter is calculated from the perspective of the 30 requirements and measures the overall compliance of the benchmarked system with the GeoSPARQL standard
They show that none of these widely used RDF storage solutions fully comply with the GeoSPARQL standard

Summary

Introduction

The geospatial Semantic Web [1] as part of the Semantic Web [2] represents an evergrowing semantically interpreted wealth of geospatial information. Several RDF storage solutions have since adopted GeoSPARQL to various extents as features of their triplestore implementations [8,9]. These varying levels of implementation may lead to some false assumptions of users when choosing an appropriate triplestore implementation for their project. Some implementations allow for defining a coordinate reference system (CRS) [10] in a given WKT geometry literal as stated in the GeoSPARQL standard (e.g., GraphDB). Other implementations do not allow a CRS definition and instead only support the world geodetic system WGS84 (e.g., RDF4J) [11]

Objectives

Results

Discussion

Conclusion