From 9-IM Topological Operators to Qualitative Spatial Relations using
  3D Selective Nef Complexes and Logic Rules for bodies
  This paper presents a method to compute automatically topological relations
using SWRL rules. The calculation of these rules is based on the definition of
a Selective Nef Complexes Nef Polyhedra structure generated from standard
Polyhedron. The Selective Nef Complexes is a data model providing a set of
binary Boolean operators such as Union, Difference, Intersection and Symmetric
difference, and unary operators such as Interior, Closure and Boundary. In this
work, these operators are used to compute topological relations between objects
defined by the constraints of the 9 Intersection Model (9-IM) from Egenhofer.
With the help of these constraints, we defined a procedure to compute the
topological relations on Nef polyhedra. These topological relationships are
Disjoint, Meets, Contains, Inside, Covers, CoveredBy, Equals and Overlaps, and
defined in a top-level ontology with a specific semantic definition on relation
such as Transitive, Symmetric, Asymmetric, Functional, Reflexive, and
Irreflexive. The results of the computation of topological relationships are
stored in an OWL-DL ontology allowing after what to infer on these new
relationships between objects. In addition, logic rules based on the Semantic
Web Rule Language allows the definition of logic programs that define which
topological relationships have to be computed on which kind of objects with
specific attributes. For instance, a "Building" that overlaps a "Railway" is a
"RailStation".
