Commonsense spatial reasoning about heterogeneous events in urban computing

In this paper we discuss the adoption of a formal approach to correlation of heterogeneous information based on qualitative spatial reasoning to contribute to some relevant aspects that stream reasoning need to face in Urban Computing. The approach is based on the adoption of Commonsense Spatial Hybrid Logics to reason about events and infer higher-level scenarios of interest. This paper therefore extends previous work of the authors in the context of pervasive computing systems in order to take into account an urban-scale application context. In order to discuss the advantages of the approach a real-world application devoted to control and monitor different phenomena occurring in urban environments is described. Finally, some issues related to the exploitation of the approach in Semantic Web frameworks are discussed.