Unification of Geospatial Reasoning, Temporal Logic, & Social Network Analysis in an RDF Database

This paper is about a new type of event database that enables efficient reasoning about things, people, companies, relationships between people and companies, and about places and events. The event database is built on top of a scalable distributed RDF triple store that can handle literally billions of events. Like objects, events have at least one actor, but usually more, a start-time and possibly an end-time, a place where the event happened, and the type of the event. An event can have many additional properties and annotations. On top of this event database we implemented libraries for RDFS++ logic reasoning, for geospatial and temporal capabilities, and an extensive social network analysis package. This paper focuses on a query framework that makes it easy to combine all of the aforementioned capabilities in a user friendly query language. Index Terms – Geotemporal logic, geospatial reasoning, RDF database, graph database, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL, social network analytics, business intelligence, event-based systems, event-driven architectures, metadata, semantic technologies.