Fuzzy Spatiotemporal Data Modeling and Operations in RDF

Abstract

With the emergence of a large number of fuzzy spatiotemporal data on the Web, how to represent and operate fuzzy spatiotemporal data has become an important research issue. Meanwhile, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a standard data and knowledge description language of the Semantic Web and has been applied in many application areas, such as geographic information systems and meteorological systems. In this paper, a model for representing fuzzy spatiotemporal data is proposed and a set of algebraic operations for the model are investigated. First, a representation method of fuzzy spatiotemporal RDF data and a fuzzy spatiotemporal RDF graph model are proposed. In addition, a formal fuzzy spatiotemporal RDF algebra is proposed and a set of algebraic operations for manipulating fuzzy spatiotemporal RDF data are developed. The algebraic operations include: set operation, selection operation, projection operation, join operation, and construction operation. Finally, the existing SPARQL query language is extended and an example that shows how to apply the proposed algebraic operations to capture the queries expressed by the extended SPARQL query language is given.