Jonghoon Kim, Incheol Kim

KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 103-116, Feb. 2017
10.3745/KTSDE.2017.6.2.103,   PDF Download:
Keywords: Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, Topological Relation, Minimal Disjunctive Relations, Distributed Parallel Programming
Abstract

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a large-scale qualitative spatial reasoner, which can derive new qualitative spatial knowledge representing both topological and directional relationships between two arbitrary spatial objects in efficient way using Aparch Spark SQL. Apache Spark SQL is well known as a distributed parallel programming environment which provides both efficient join operations and query processing functions over a variety of data in Hadoop cluster computer systems. In our spatial reasoner, the overall reasoning process is divided into 6 jobs such as knowledge encoding, inverse reasoning, equal reasoning, transitive reasoning, relation refining, knowledge decoding, and then the execution order over the reasoning jobs is determined in consideration of both logical causal relationships and computational efficiency. The knowledge encoding job reduces the size of knowledge base to reason over by transforming the input knowledge of XML/RDF form into one of more precise form. Repeat of the transitive reasoning job and the relation refining job usually consumes most of computational time and storage for the overall reasoning process. In order to improve the jobs, our reasoner finds out the minimal disjunctive relations for qualitative spatial reasoning, and then, based upon them, it not only reduces the composition table to be used for the transitive reasoning job, but also optimizes the relation refining job. Through experiments using a large-scale benchmarking spatial knowledge base, the proposed reasoner showed high performance and scalability.

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