Abstract
This paper proposes a qualitative coordinate language of regional individuals. It is shown that representing a configuration of regions using a coordinate language of regional individuals supports a primary breakup of a spatial configuration into primary objects of focus and secondary objects of reference, i.e., in figure and ground. We define the notion of figure and ground in terms of regions and regional partitions using the RCC theory. Coordinates represent the location of a figure region within a partition of ground regions. Coordinates are n-tuples of ‘figure ground relations’. In this paper we formally define ‘figure ground relations’ and analyze their properties. We show that the qualitative coordinate language of regions can be used as a general framework to create finite theories of arbitrary, possibly infinite configurations of regional phenomena.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bittner, T. (1997). A qualitative coordinate language of location of figures within the ground. In: Hirtle, S.C., Frank, A.U. (eds) Spatial Information Theory A Theoretical Basis for GIS. COSIT 1997. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1329. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63623-4_53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-63623-4_53
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