• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.103-116
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• 2017

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a large-scale qualitative spatial reasoner, which can derive new qualitative spatial knowledge representing both topological and directional relationships between two arbitrary spatial objects in efficient way using Aparch Spark SQL. Apache Spark SQL is well known as a distributed parallel programming environment which provides both efficient join operations and query processing functions over a variety of data in Hadoop cluster computer systems. In our spatial reasoner, the overall reasoning process is divided into 6 jobs such as knowledge encoding, inverse reasoning, equal reasoning, transitive reasoning, relation refining, knowledge decoding, and then the execution order over the reasoning jobs is determined in consideration of both logical causal relationships and computational efficiency. The knowledge encoding job reduces the size of knowledge base to reason over by transforming the input knowledge of XML/RDF form into one of more precise form. Repeat of the transitive reasoning job and the relation refining job usually consumes most of computational time and storage for the overall reasoning process. In order to improve the jobs, our reasoner finds out the minimal disjunctive relations for qualitative spatial reasoning, and then, based upon them, it not only reduces the composition table to be used for the transitive reasoning job, but also optimizes the relation refining job. Through experiments using a large-scale benchmarking spatial knowledge base, the proposed reasoner showed high performance and scalability.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.774-779
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• 2015

In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a large-scale qualitative spatial reasoner using Apache Spark, an in-memory high speed cluster computing environment, which is effective for sequencing and iterating component reasoning jobs. The proposed reasoner can not only check the integrity of a large-scale spatial knowledge base representing topological and directional relationships between spatial objects, but also expand the given knowledge base by deriving new facts in highly efficient ways. In general, qualitative reasoning on topological and directional relationships between spatial objects includes a number of composition operations on every possible pair of disjunctive relations. The proposed reasoner enhances computational efficiency by determining the minimal set of disjunctive relations for spatial reasoning and then reducing the size of the composition table to include only that set. Additionally, in order to improve performance, the proposed reasoner is designed to minimize disk I/Os during distributed reasoning jobs, which are performed on a Hadoop cluster system. In experiments with both artificial and real spatial knowledge bases, the proposed Spark-based spatial reasoner showed higher performance than the existing MapReduce-based one.