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Combining Ontological and Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: Application to Urban Images Interpretation

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Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2013)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 454))

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) applied to the interpretation of urban satellite images. This reasoning is integrated within an ontology of urban objects, which has been implemented in cooperation with expert geographers. The spatial concepts mainly include the set of topological relations of the Region Connection Calculus theory (RCC8), and the set of computational primitives (CM8) which have been defined for computing the RCC8 relations on raster images. Our approach relies on a reified representation of the RCC8 relationship and of the CM8 primitives, within a lattice of concepts, implemented in OWL (Ontology Web Language). It provides a straightforward representation of concepts corresponding to conjunctions or disjunctions of spatial relations, and thus offers the advantage to overcome some drawbacks of the existing approaches in OWL, where spatial relations are represented as roles. Indeed, the OWL language does not allow the expression of the disjunction of roles. We can then implement a reasoning on the RCC8 relationship, which in particular allows the computation of the composition table and its transitive closure. As the reification of roles precludes the use of role’s properties, such as symmetry and transitivity, we propose to implement RCC8 inferences through SWRL rules (Semantic Web Rule Language).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://protege.stanford.edu.

  2. 2.

    \(PO(x,y) \wedge TPP(y,z) \Rightarrow TPP(x,z) \vee NTPP(x,z) \vee PO(x,z)\).

  3. 3.

    In general, for every spatial relation \( SR \), \( SR^{-1} \) represents its inverse.

  4. 4.

    http://owlapi.sourceforge.net/.

  5. 5.

    http://icube-bfo.unistra.fr/fr/index.php/Plateformes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICube Laboratory, BFO Team, INSA de Strasbourg, CNRS, Strasbourg, France

    François de Bertrand de Beuvron & Cecilia Zanni-Merk

  2. ICube Laboratory, BFO Team, Strasbourg University, CNRS, Strasbourg, France

    Stella Marc-Zwecker

  3. ICube Laboratory, BFO Team, Strasbourg University/ENGEES, CNRS, Strasbourg, France

    Florence Le Ber

Authors
  1. François de Bertrand de Beuvron
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  2. Stella Marc-Zwecker
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  3. Cecilia Zanni-Merk
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  4. Florence Le Ber
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to François de Bertrand de Beuvron .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Fred

  2. Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Jan L.G. Dietz

  3. Henley Business School, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

    Kecheng Liu

  4. INSTICC, Setubal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

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de Bertrand de Beuvron, F., Marc-Zwecker, S., Zanni-Merk, C., Le Ber, F. (2015). Combining Ontological and Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: Application to Urban Images Interpretation. In: Fred, A., Dietz, J., Liu, K., Filipe, J. (eds) Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K 2013. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 454. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46549-3_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46549-3_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-46548-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-46549-3

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