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

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

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
• /
• v.3 no.10
• /
• pp.397-406
• /
• 2014

In order to answer the questions successfully on behalf of the human in DeepQA environments such as Jeopardy! of the American quiz show, the computer is required to have the capability of fast temporal and spatial reasoning on a large-scale commonsense knowledge base. In this paper, we present a scalable spatial reasoning algorithm for deriving efficiently new directional and topological relations using the MapReduce framework, one of well-known parallel distributed computing environments. The proposed reasoning algorithm assumes as input a large-scale spatial knowledge base including CSD-9 directional relations and RCC-8 topological relations. To infer new directional and topological relations from the given spatial knowledge base, it performs the cross-consistency checks as well as the path-consistency checks on the knowledge base. To maximize the parallelism of reasoning computations according to the principle of the MapReduce framework, we design the algorithm to partition effectively the large knowledge base into smaller ones and distribute them over multiple computing nodes at the map phase. And then, at the reduce phase, the algorithm infers the new knowledge from distributed spatial knowledge bases. Through experiments performed on the sample knowledge base with the MapReduce-based implementation of our algorithm, we proved the high performance of our large-scale spatial reasoner.

• Journal of KIISE
• /
• v.42 no.5
• /
• pp.601-608
• /
• 2015

In order to answer questions successfully on behalf of the human contestant in DeepQA environments such as 'Jeopardy!', the American quiz show, the computer needs to have the capability of fast temporal and spatial reasoning on a large-scale commonsense knowledge base. In this paper, we present a hybrid spatial reasoning algorithm, among various efficient spatial reasoning methods, for handling directional and topological relations. Our algorithm not only improves the query processing time while reducing unnecessary reasoning calculation, but also effectively deals with the change of spatial knowledge base, as it takes a hybrid method that combines forward and backward reasoning. Through experiments performed on the sample spatial knowledge base with the hybrid spatial reasoner of our algorithm, we demonstrated the high performance of our hybrid spatial reasoning algorithm.

• Proceedings of the Korea Information Processing Society Conference
• /
• 2015.10a
• /
• pp.1316-1319
• /
• 2015

본 논문에서는 대규모 분산 병렬 컴퓨팅 환경인 하둡 클러스터 시스템을 이용하여, 공간 객체들 간의 위상 관계를 효율적으로 추론하는 대용량 정성 공간 추론기를 제안한다. 본 논문에서 제안하는 공간 추론기는 추론 작업의 순차성과 반복성을 고려하여, 작업들 간의 디스크 입출력을 최소화할 수 있는 인-메모리 기반의 아파치 스파크 프레임워크를 이용하여 개발하였다. 따라서 본 추론기에서는 추론의 대상이 되는 대용량 공간 지식들을 아파치 스파크의 분산 데이터 집합 형태인 PairRDD와 RDD로 변환하고, 이들에 대한 데이터 오퍼레이션들로 추론 작업들을 구현하였다. 또한, 본 추론기에서는 추론 시간의 많은 부분을 차지하는 이행 관계 추론에 필요한 조합표를 효과적으로 축소함으로써, 공간 추론 작업의 성능을 크게 향상시켰다. 대용량의 공간 지식 베이스를 이용한 성능 분석 실험을 통해, 본 논문에서 제안한 정성 공간 추론기의 높은 성능을 확인할 수 있었다.