GeoSPARQL is a standard for representation and querying of

geospatial Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also call ...

linked data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but r ...

for the Semantic Web from the

Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 1994 ...

(OGC). The definition of a small ontology based on well-understood OGC standards is intended to provide a standardized exchange basis for geospatial RDF data which can support both qualitative and quantitative spatial reasoning and querying with the

SPARQL SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle" , a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language—that is, a semantic query language for databases—able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description F ...

database query language. The

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Linked Data Platform uses

OWL Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes (), which includes over 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers a ...

mappings for GeoSPARQL equivalent properties in its vocabulary. Th
LinkedGeoData
data set is a work of the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) research group at the

University of Leipzig Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...

, a group mostly known for

DBpedia DBpedia (from "DB" for "database") is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created in the Wikipedia project. This structured information is made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to semantica ...

, that uses the GeoSPARQL vocabulary to represent

OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g ...

data. In particular, GeoSPARQL provides for: * a small

topological In mathematics, topology (from the Greek words , and ) is concerned with the properties of a geometric object that are preserved under continuous deformations, such as stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending; that is, without closing h ...

ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

RDFS RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema, variously abbreviated as RDFS, , RDF-S, or RDF/S) is a set of classes with certain properties using the RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the descr ...

for representation using **

Geography Markup Language The Geography Markup Language (GML) is the XML grammar defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to express geographical features. GML serves as a modeling language for geographic systems as well as an open interchange format for geographic ...

(GML) and

well-known text representation of geometry Well-known text (WKT) is a text markup language for representing vector geometry objects. A binary equivalent, known as well-known binary (WKB), is used to transfer and store the same information in a more compact form convenient for computer proc ...

(WKT) literals, and **

Simple Features Simple Features (officially Simple Feature Access) is a set of standards that specify a common storage and access model of geographic feature made of mostly two-dimensional geometries (point, line, polygon, multi-point, multi-line, etc.) used by g ...

RCC8 The region connection calculus (RCC) is intended to serve for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. RCC abstractly describes regions (in Euclidean space, or in a topological space) by their possible relations to each other. RCC8 consis ...

, and

DE-9IM The Dimensionally Extended 9-Intersection Model (DE-9IM) is a topological model and a standard used to describe the spatial relations of two regions (two geometries in two-dimensions, R2), in geometry, point-set topology, geospatial topology, ...

(a.k.a. Clementini, Egenhofer) topological relationship vocabularies and ontologies for qualitative reasoning, and * a

query interface using ** a set of topological SPARQL extension functions for quantitative reasoning, and ** a set of

Rule Interchange Format The Rule Interchange Format (RIF) is a W3C Recommendation. RIF is part of the infrastructure for the semantic web, along with (principally) SPARQL, RDF and OWL. Although originally envisioned by many as a "rules layer" for the semantic web, in ...

(RIF) Core inference rules for query transformation and interpretation.

Example

The following example SPARQL query could help model the question "What is within the bounding box defined by and ?" PREFIX geo: PREFIX geof: SELECT ?what WHERE

RCC8 use in GeoSPARQL

has been implemented in GeoSPARQL as described below: Region Connection Calculus 8 Relations and Open Geospatial Consortium relations

Implementations

There are (almost) no complete implementations of GeoSPARQL, there are, however partial or vendor implementations of GeoSPARQL. Currently there are the following implementations: ;

Apache Marmotta Apache Marmotta is a linked data platform that comprises several components. In its most basic configuration it is a Linked Data server. Marmotta is one of the reference projects early implementing the new Linked Data Platform recommendation that ...

: GeoSPARQL was implemented in the context of the

Google Summer of Code The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program in which Google awards stipends to contributors who successfully complete a free and open-source software coding project during the summer. , the program is ...

2015. on Apache Marmotta; it uses

PostGIS PostGIS ( ) is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Technicall ...

, and it is available just for

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

. ;

Apache Jena Apache Jena is an open source Semantic Web framework for Java. It provides an API to extract data from and write to RDF graphs. The graphs are represented as an abstract "model". A model can be sourced with data from files, databases, URLs or ...

: Since version 2.11 Apache Jena has a GeoSPARQL extension.
Ontop VKG
: Support for GeoSPARQL was added to Ontop in version 4.2.
Parliament
: Parliament has an almost complete implementation of GeoSPARQL by using JENA and a modified ARQ query processor.
Eclipse RDF4J
: Eclipse RDF4J is an open-source Java framework for scalable RDF processing, storage, reasoning and SPARQL querying. It offers support for a large subset of GeoSPARQL functionality.
Strabon
: Strabon is an open-source semantic spatiotemporal RDF store that supports two popular extensions of SPARQL: stSPARQL and GeoSPARQL. Strabon is built by extending the well-known RDF store Sesame and extends Sesame's components to manage thematic, spatial and temporal data that is stored in the backend RDBMS. It has been fully tested with

(with

and PostgreSQL-Temporal extensions) and

MonetDB MonetDB is an open-source column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS) originally developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It is designed to provide high performance on complex queries against lar ...

(with geom module). ; OpenSahara uSeek
IndexingSail

Sesame Sesame ( or ; ''Sesamum indicum'') is a flowering plant in the genus ''Sesamum'', also called benne. Numerous wild relatives occur in Africa and a smaller number in India. It is widely naturalized in tropical regions around the world and is cu ...

Sail plugin : uSeekM IndexingSail uses a PostGIS installation to deliver GeoSPARQL. They deliver partial implementation of GeoSPARQL along with some vendor prefixes.
Oracle Spatial and Graph

GraphDB
: GraphDB is an enterprise ready Semantic Graph Database, compliant with W3C Standards. Semantic graph databases (also called RDF triplestores) provide the core infrastructure for solutions where modelling agility, data integration, relationship exploration and cross-enterprise data publishing and consumption are important.
Stardog
: Stardog is an enterprise data unification platform built on smart graph technology: query, search, inference, and data virtualization. ;

Virtuoso Universal Server Virtuoso Universal Server is a middleware and database engine hybrid that combines the functionality of a traditional relational database management system (RDBMS), object–relational database (ORDBMS), virtual database, RDF, XML, free-text, ...

: Virtuoso Universal Server is a middleware and database engine hybrid that combines the functionality of a traditional Relational database management system (RDBMS), Object-relational database (ORDBMS), virtual database, RDF, XML, free-text, web application server and file server functionality in a single system.

Performance and Compliance Benchmarking

Benchmarking GeoSPARQL 1.0 and geospatial-enabled triplestores, in general, has been conducted using several approaches. One can distinguish between performance and compliance benchmarks. The former can reveal whether a triplestore gives a timely answer to a GeoSPARQL query and may or may not check the answer for correctness. The latter checks whether a triplestore gives compliant answers with respect to the definitions of the GeoSPARQL 1.0 standard irrespective of the time the query takes for execution. Well-known geospatial performance benchmarks include the Geographica and Geographica 2 benchmarks which track the performance of predefined sets of queries on synthetic and real-world datasets. They each test a subset of GeoSPARQL query functions for performance. Another performance benchmark by Huang et al. assessed the performance of GeoSPARQL-enabled triple stores as part of a spatial data infrastructure. Compliance benchmarking of OGC standards is usually conducted as part of th
OGC Team Engine Test Suite
which allows companies to get certified for implementing certain OGC specifications correctly. As of 2021, however, the OGC Team Engine does not provide a set of compliance tests to test GeoSPARQL compliance. Nevertheless, in 2021, Jovanovik et al. developed the first comprehensive, reproducible GeoSPARQL Compliance benchmark in which nine different triple stores were initially tested. The results of these first compliance tests along with the software are available o
Github

Submission

The GeoSPARQL standard was submitted to the OGC by: *

Australian Bureau of Meteorology Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Aus ...

Bentley Systems Bentley Systems, Incorporated is an American-based software development company that develops, manufactures, licenses, sells and supports computer software and services for the design, construction, and operation of infrastructure. The company' ...

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO ...

(CSIRO) * Defence Geospatial Information Working Group (DGIWG) *

Natural Resources Canada Natural Resources Canada (NRCan; french: Ressources naturelles Canada; french: RNCan, label=none)Natural Resources Canada is the applied title under the Federal Identity Program; the legal title is Department of Natural Resources (). is the depa ...

* Interactive Instruments GmbH *

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

America *

Raytheon Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitaliza ...

* Traverse Technologies *

US Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, an ...

(USGS)

Future development

With regards to future work, the GeoSPARQL standard states: In 2019, th
OGC's GeoSemantics Domain Working Group
set out to assess the current usage of GeoSPARQL in different domains in the White Paper "OGC Benefits of Representing Spatial Data Using Semantic and Graph Technologies" and collected initial feature requests to extend GeoSPARQL. This led to the re-establishment of th
GeoSPARQL Standards Working Group
with a newly forme
working group charter
in September 2020. The group is working towards a new release of the GeoSPARQL standard, with non-breaking changes - GeoSPARQL 1.1 - in the summer of 2021, the development of which can be followed o
Github
At th
GeoLD workshop 2021
held as part of th
Extended Semantic Web Conference 2021
an outline of the additions which are likely to be present in GeoSPARQL 1.1 has been presented. The changes have been further consolidated and summarized in a publication in the ISPRS International Journal of GeoInformation.

References

* * * * *

External links

GeoSPARQL – A Geographic Query Language for RDF Data
standard from the

Linked Data Platform webapps
from the UK

LinkedGeoData
for

data
data.geohive.ie
from

Ordnance Survey Ireland Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI; ga, Suirbhéireacht Ordanáis Éireann) is the national mapping agency of Ireland. It was established on 4 March 2002 as a body corporate. It is the successor to the former Ordnance Survey of Ireland. It and the ...

{{Open Geospatial Consortium standards GIS file formats Open Geospatial Consortium RDF data access SPARQL