locatedIn

LocatedIn is a binary relation used in knowledge representation and data modeling to express that one entity exists inside or is contained by another entity deemed a location. It is commonly used to encode geographic containment (a city locatedIn a country), administrative hierarchies (a building locatedIn a campus), or organizational containment (a department locatedIn a division). The relation is directional: the first argument denotes the object, the second the container location.

In ontologies and graphs, locatedIn supports queries about geographic scope, spatial networks, and hierarchical organization. Some datasets treat locatedIn as transitive: if A locatedIn B and B locatedIn C, then A locatedIn C; others model containment more conservatively and do not infer such transitive closure. The property can be many-to-one or many-to-many, reflecting that an object may be located in multiple places depending on granularity or context.

Implementation and modeling: in RDF or OWL, locatedIn is typically an object property with domain Thing and range Place (or Location). It may be enriched with metadata such as confidence, timestamp, coordinate bounds, or precision. When integrating with GIS systems, locatedIn can link to spatial coordinates, place polygons, or geographic identifiers (like ISO codes).

Examples include: “The Statue of Liberty locatedIn Liberty Island” (and within New York Harbor) or “The patient address locatedIn city.” In practice, locatedIn is used alongside related properties such as hasCoordinate, isIn, or within to support location-aware applications and analyses.