Formal Qualitative Spatial Augmentation of the Simple Feature Access Model

The need to share and integrate heterogeneous geospatial data has resulted in the development of geospatial data standards such as the OGC/ISO standard Simple Feature Access (SFA), that standardize operations and simple topological and mereotopological relations over various geometric features such as points, line segments, polylines, polygons, and polyhedral surfaces. While SFA’s supplied relations enable qualitative querying over the geometric features, the relations' semantics are not formalized. This lack of formalization prevents further automated reasoning - apart from simple querying - with the geometric data, either in isolation or in conjunction with external purely qualitative information as one might extract from textual sources, such as social media. To enable joint qualitative reasoning over geometric and qualitative spatial information, this work formalizes the semantics of SFA’s geometric features and mereotopological relations by defining or restricting them in terms of the spatial entity types and relations provided by CODIB, a first-order logical theory from an existing logical formalization of multidimensional qualitative space.