Knowledge discovery in spatial databases: the PADRÃO’s qualitative approach

Abstract

Knowledge discovery in databases is a complex process concerned with the discovery of relationships and other descriptions from data. Knowledge discovery in spatial databases represents a particular case of discovery, allowing the discovery of relationships that exist between spatial and non-spatial data, and other data characteristics that aren’t explicitly stored in spatial databases. This paper describes the conception and implementation of PADRÃO, a system for knowledge discovery in spatial databases. PADRÃO presents a new approach to this process, which is based on qualitative spatial reasoning. The spatial semantic knowledge and the principles of qualitative spatial reasoning needed for the spatial reasoning process are available in the PADRÃO’s geographic database and PADRÃO’s spatial knowledge base, allowing the integration of the geo-spatial component, associated with the analysed non-geographic data, in the process of knowledge discovery.