Rule-based systems have been used for decision
support in the past but these are typically closed
client bases systems. However the advantage of the
Semantic Web is that the data, ontologies and rules
are described using well defined standards (w3c.org)
and can be made available over the Web as
published resources, typically in one of a number of
machine (and human) readable formats (Gupta and
Knoblock, 2010). The vision is that, ontologies,
especially those of a general nature, can be shared
and re-used in many applications. In our case, it is
envisaged that once a working solution for the
approvals process has been validated for one
jurisdiction (Western Australia), the ontologies and
rules can be used in other jurisdictions (Victoria,
New South Wales etc.) and domains.
The work is part of a research program into
Spatial Data Infrastructures being conducted at the
Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information
(CRCSI), Australia. One of the objectives of the
research program is to automate spatial data supply
chains from end-to-end to enable access to the right
data, at the right time, at the right price (McMeekin
and West, 2012).
This research is focusing on the first stage in the
spatial data supply chain process, which is the
creation of spatial data generated through a land
development business process. Instead of paper-
based systems, the method enables the capture of
spatial information in machine-readable form at its
inception point. This is a significant step towards
achieving downstream workflow automation. It also
supports the recording of data provenance in
machine-readable form at the commencement of a
spatial transaction to support legal and data quality
attribution.
The development consists of two stages. In the
first stage, a GUI-based interactive system called
Protégé is used to design ontologies and rules from
spatial data schema and various documents
including policies. The second stage uses a runtime
environment (Jena and Java) to process the
ontologies and rules along with existing and
proposed road data to determine compliance with
policies etc.
2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED
RESEARCH
Methods for spatial data processing and integration
have been researched and developed over the past
few years, however little work has considered the
automation of the decision-making process where
spatial data is an input to the approval process.
One of the objectives of the Semantic Web is to
evolve into a universal medium for information, data
and knowledge exchange, rather than just being a
source for information. To attain this, it uses the well
known http protocol and technologies (Shadbolt et al.,
2006) (Millard, 2010), such as URIs (Universal
Resource Identifiers), RDF (Resource Description
Framework) and ontologies with reasoning and rules.
One of the most important components is the
RDF, which is a language for representing
information about resources on the Web
(http://www.w3.org/RDF/). RDF aims to organize
information in a machine-readable format by
representing information as triples: <subject,
predicate, object>, a concept from the artificial
intelligence community. RDF was originally
considered as metadata but now covers data as well.
RDF triples can be used to represent tables, graphs,
trees, ontologies and rules because it describes the
relationship between subject and object resources
where a ‘object in the <subject, predicate, object>
triple can be another subject enabling subjects to be
linked together. Each of the triple components can
also be a URI so information can be linked across
the Web. RDF formatted data is much easier to
process, because its generic format contains
information that is clearly understandable as a
distributed model.
Reasoning and rules are an important part of this
research and in the Semantic Web, the Ontology
Web Language (OWL-2), based on RDF, is used for
defining Web ontologies that include rules, axioms
and constraints allowing inferencing (discovery of
new knowledge) to be performed.
The Semantic Web has been used for queries by
a user for natural events using observation sensor
data (Devaraju et al., 2015) (Yu and Liu, 2013). In
particular Devaraju et al (2015) describe a number
of ontologies used to model various sensors and
rules used to map queries such as flooding in an area
to the need to sample a number of point water
sensors. Methods have been proposed that have
potential to automate land development approval
processes. For example, the Sensing Geographic
Occurrences Ontology (SEGO) model supports
inferences of institutionalized events (Reitsma,
2005) based on time. However they do not resolve
any conflicts arising if an event qualifies based on
both policy and business rules. This research does
not cover the sensor-specific technical details
(Reitsma, 2005), but instead concentrates on the
business knowledge rules.