An ontology-based approach for managing spatio-temporal linearly referenced road event data

Transportation organisations, agencies, professionals, and officials have embraced GIS-T (Geographic Information System for Transportation) as an essential technology in planning, decision making, and maintaining transportation systems. GIS-T linear referencing (LR) is a popular tool that transforms linearly referenced road event data on the road network. Diverse transportation applications need to store and share spatio-temporal linearly referenced data. For this purpose, this paper presents an OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology based spatio-temporal LR model to manage spatio-temporal linearly referenced data. The data stored in ontology is machine-processable and can be reasoned, shared, and reused by intelligent agents, databases, and applications. Also, this research presents an appropriate method for efficiently preserving and retrieving spatio-temporal linear road segments (linear events). The method does not need to store the entire segments for each of the old time stamps but to contain only the changed portions of segments in the OWL ontology. A recursive procedure is developed to retrieve all segments for every old time stamp.