Barrier dynamics for GIS: a design pattern for geospatial barriers

Abstract

When separation between geospatial features is desired, an obstacle or barrier is used to maintain distance between the features. Barriers are used in a wide variety of domains, such as hazards, transportation, and public safety. Floodwalls, for example, prevent flooding rivers or lakes from inundating buildings. This work presents an ontology design pattern for barriers and barring events useful for GIS. In this ontology design pattern, active features (e.g., the water-body that is causing flooding) and target features (e.g., buildings requiring flood protection) are defined. Along with these key features, the ontology design pattern also captures certain barring events. These are the dynamics that arise from the placement of barriers and include Blocking, Enclosing, KeepingIn and KeepingOut, involving interactions among barriers, and active and target features. The set of classes that model these features and events as well as the relations between them are presented and formalized. This design pattern is ready for integration in a GIS to allow queries on barriers and barring events that do not currently have explicit support in most GIS.

Keywords:

• geospatial barriers
• barrier dynamics
• geospatial ontology
• geospatial semantics

Acknowledgments

Emily White’s research is supported in part by an IGERT award to the University of Iowa from the National Science Foundation, NSF award #0966130.

Notes

1. http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/geosparql

2. http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/REC-xmlschema11-2–20120405/datatypes.html#dateTime