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GeCoLan: A Constraint Language for Reasoning About Ecological Networks in the Semantic Web

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Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2017)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 976))

Abstract

Ecological Networks (ENs) describe the structure of existing real ecosystems and help planning their expansion, conservation and improvement. While various mathematical models of ENs have been defined, to our knowledge they focus on simulating ecosystems, but none of them deals with verifying whether any transformation proposals, as those collected in participatory decision-making processes for public policy making, are consistent with land usage restrictions.

As an attempt to fill this gap, we developed a model to represent the specifications for the local planning of ENs in a way that can support both the detection of constraint violations within new proposals of expansion, and the reasoning about improvements of the networks. In line with the GeoSpatial Semantic WEB, our model is based on an OWL ontology for the representation of ENs. Moreover, we define a language, GeCoLan, supporting constraint-based reasoning on semantic data. Even though this paper focuses on EN validation, our language can be employed to enable more complex tasks, such as the generation of proposals for improving ENs.

The present paper describes our ontological specification of ENs, the GeCoLan language for reasoning about specifications, and the tools we developed to support data acquisition and constraint verification on ENs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.cittametropolitana.torino.it/.

  2. 2.

    www.polito.it.

  3. 3.

    www.enea.it.

  4. 4.

    The Priority Expansion Elements are the areas with residual ecological functionality where the priority is intervening to increase the functionality of the primary ecological network and implementing conservation measures.

  5. 5.

    Filter expressions correspond to whole constraints to be evaluated in the FILTER clause of SPARQL; see Sect. 5.1.

  6. 6.

    We write G for short to denote functional property hasGeometry that applies to both ConnectionElements and LandUseElements.

  7. 7.

    In GeoSPARQL, the topological relations such as sfOverlaps are computed on the geometries associated with the individuals in class Feature (lue and ce in our example) through the defaultGeometry property.

  8. 8.

    www.antlr.org/.

  9. 9.

    https://jena.apache.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially funded by project MIMOSA (MultIModal Ontology-driven query system for the heterogeneous data of a SmArtcity, “Progetto di Ateneo Torino_call2014_L2_157”, 2015–17), and by “Ricerca Locale” and “Ricerca Autofinanziata” of the University of Torino.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, Turin, Italy

    Gianluca Torta, Liliana Ardissono, Marco Corona & Adriano Savoca

  2. Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche del Territorio, Turin, Italy

    Luigi La Riccia & Angioletta Voghera

Authors
  1. Gianluca Torta
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  2. Liliana Ardissono
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  3. Marco Corona
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  4. Luigi La Riccia
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  5. Adriano Savoca
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  6. Angioletta Voghera
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gianluca Torta .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ana Fred

  2. University of Madeira, Funchal, Portugal

    David Aveiro

  3. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Jan L. G. Dietz

  4. Henley Business School, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Kecheng Liu

  5. University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Jorge Bernardino

  6. Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil

    Ana Salgado

  7. INSTICC and Instituto Politecnico de Setúbal, Setúbal, Portugal

    Joaquim Filipe

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Torta, G., Ardissono, L., Corona, M., La Riccia, L., Savoca, A., Voghera, A. (2019). GeCoLan: A Constraint Language for Reasoning About Ecological Networks in the Semantic Web. In: Fred, A., et al. Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. IC3K 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 976. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15640-4_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15640-4_14

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