Abstract
In 2012, the Open Geospatial Consortium published GeoSPARQL defining “an RDF/OWL ontology for [spatial] information”, “SPARQL extension functions” for performing spatial operations on RDF data and “RIF rules” defining entailments to be drawn from graph pattern matching. In the 8+ years since its publication, GeoSPARQL has become the most important spatial Semantic Web standard, as judged by references to it in other Semantic Web standards and its wide use for Semantic Web data. An update to GeoSPARQL was proposed in 2019 to deliver a version 1.1 with a charter to: handle outstanding change requests and source new ones from the user community and to “better present” the standard, that is to better link all the standard’s parts and better document and exemplify elements. Expected updates included new geometry representations, alignments to other ontologies, handling of new spatial referencing systems, and new artifact presentation. This paper describes motivating change requests and actual resultant updates in the candidate version 1.1 of the standard alongside reference implementations and usage examples. We also describe the theory behind particular updates, initial implementations of many parts of the standard, and our expectations for GeoSPARQL 1.1’s use.
Highlights
Introduction and MotivationThe GeoSPARQL standard, issued in 2012 by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)(https://www.ogc.org, accessed on 30 October 2021) is one of the most popular SemanticWeb standards for spatial data
The Standards Working Group (SWG) decided that the criteria for geometry representation in GeoSPARQL 1.1 were that the literals had to be able to act as geometry objects in order to satisfy at least some major proportion of the GeoSPARQL functions
Features discussed for GeoSPARQL 1.2 include the formalisation of coordinate reference systems in Resource Description Format (RDF), the depiction of accuracies and level of detail, and the addition of further–possibly binary–literal types
Summary
(https://www.ogc.org, accessed on 30 October 2021) is one of the most popular Semantic. The motivation for work within the area of GeoSPARQL, that of spatial Semantic Web data more generally, and some specific fault fixes and proposed extensions to GeoSPARQL 1.0 are captured in an OGC White Paper [17]. Internet protocol-based selection of different geometries for features Some of these proposed updates were predicted in GeoSPARQL 1.0, with the Future Work section listing several of the points above. The SWG’s Charter, anticipating that the more obvious updates such as new geometry serialisations would certainly be implemented, listed the following extra areas of investigation that emerged from SWG proponent’s discussions: Revising “upper ontology” GeoSPARQL structure–how its classes relate to fundamental concepts in ontology; Alignments to other ontologies, perhaps W3C Time Ontology in OWL [19]; Catering for very different SRSes, such as Discrete Global Grid Systems. We discuss the new structure of the standard’s specification (Section 2.1), describe relevant extensions to the ontology model and query language in Sections 2.4 and 2.9
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