Modeling of dynamic phenomena in spatial planning with the use of formal ontology

Abstract

Spatial management and spatial planning both have a multidisciplinary nature and refer to dynamically changing reality. Design decisions can affect the integrity of the environmental system. Improvement of spatial management depends on better methods of planning and forecasting about the environmental effects of development change. Such approach is offered by ontologies, based on Description Logics (DL) and related to them inference systems. Ontologies can be enriched with additional logical systems. The authors present a way of building domain ontologies for spatial planning supplemented by structures of temporal logic. As a result, the analysis for exploring the topological relations between spatial objects will be extended to include temporal relationships. Spatio-temporal models with temporal logic structures could be a subject of inference process, performed by reasoner engines. Spatio-temporal representations are offered by so-called upper ontologies in this case group of fundamental ontologies. The set of such ontologies includes GFO, BFO, OCHRE and others. Such ontologies are useful for modeling of spatial data with focus on their dynamics of changes. They make possible a prediction of scenarios of expected spatial transformation and forecasting a future state of spatial development and environmental conditions