PelletSpatial

PelletSpatial extends Pellet OWL reasoner with qualitative spatial reasoning capabilities. It supports reasoning with the well-known qualitative spatial representation framework Region Connection Calculus.

Download PelletSpatial 0.1

Technical Overview

RCC (Region Connection Calculus) allows one to represent regions abstractly by the possible topological relations between regions. There are eight basic topological relations in RCC referred to as RCC-8 relations. These relations are DC (is disconnected from), EC (is externally connected with), PO (partially overlaps), TPP (is a tangential proper part of), NTPP (is a nontangential proper part of), TPPi (inverse of TPP), NTPPi (inverse of NTPP) and EQ (is spatially equal to).

PelletSpatial supports checking the consistency of spatial relations expressed using RCC-8 and computes new spatial inferences from asserted relations. The spatial relations can be expressed in RDF/OWL and combined with arbitrary domain ontologies. PelletSpatial can answer SPARQL queries that mix spatial relations with arbitrary RDF/OWL relations. You can find more examples in the PelletSpatial distribution.

Status

PelletSpatial is currently considered to be a proof-of-concept system and should be treated as an alpha software. We are currently working on improvements to both extend its expressivity and improve the reasoning performance.

PelletSpatial has been developed primarily by Markus Stocker with occasional help from the C&P team. Feel free to send your questions and comments about PelletSpatial to the Pellet users mailing list.