Abstract
Topological relationships between spatial objects represent important knowledge that users of geographic information systems expect to retrieve from a spatial database. A difficult task is to assign precise semantics to user queries involving concepts such as “crosses”, “is inside”, “is adjacent”. In this paper, we present two methods for describing topological relationships. The first method is an extension of the geometric point-set approach by taking the dimension of the intersections into account. This results in a very large number of different topological relationships for point, line, and area features. In the second method, which aims to be more suitable for humans, we propose to group all possible cases into a few meaningful topological relationships and we discuss their exclusiveness and completeness with respect to the point-set approach.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Ronald F. Abler. The national science foundation national center for geographic information and analysis. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 1(4):303–326, 1987.
K. Bennis et al. GéoGraph: A topological storage model for extensible GIS. In Auto-Carto 10, pages 349–367, March 1991.
Eliseo Clementini and Paolino Di Felice. An object calculus for geographic databases. In ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pages 302–308, Indianapolis, February 1993.
Eliseo Clementini, Paolino Di Felice, and Alessandro D'Atri. A spatial data model underlying human interaction with object-oriented spatial databases. In Fifteenth Annual International Computer Software & Applications Conference, pages 110–117, Tokyo, September 1991. IEEE Computer Society Press.
Sylvia de Hoop and Peter van Oosterom. Storage and manipulation of topology in Postgres. In Third European Conference on Geographical Information Systems, pages 1324–1336, Munich, March 1992.
Max J. Egenhofer and Robert D. Franzosa. Point-set topological spatial relations. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 5(2):161–174, 1991.
Max J. Egenhofer and John R. Herring. Categorizing binary topological relationships between regions, lines, and points in geographic databases. Technical report, Department of Surveying Engineering, University of Maine, Orono, ME, 1992. submitted for publication.
Thanasis Hadzilacos and Nectaria Tryfona. A model for expressing topological integrity constraints in geographic databases. In Theories and Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space, Lecture Notes in Computer Science no. 639, pages 252–268. Springer-Verlag, 1992.
John L. Kelley. General Topology. Springer-Verlag, New York, 1955.
David M. Mark and Max J. Egenhofer. An evaluation of the 9-intersection for region-line relations. In GIS/LIS Conference, San Jose, CA, November 1992.
Sudhakar Menon and Terence R. Smith. A declarative spatial query processor for Geographic Information Systems. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing, 35(11):1593–1600, November 1989.
Nick Roussopoulos, Christos Faloutsos, and Timos Sellis. An efficient pictorial database system for PSQL. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 14(5):639–650, May 1988.
Michael Stonebraker and Lawrence A. Rowe. The design of Postgres. ACM SIGMOD, 15(2):340–355, 1986.
Michael Stonebraker, Lawrence A. Rowe, and Michael Hirohama. The implementation of Postgres. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2(1):125–142, March 1990.
Peter van Oosterom and Tom Vijlbrief. Building a GIS on top of the open DBMS “Postgres”. In Proceedings EGIS'91: Second European Conference on Geographical Information Systems, pages 775–787, Utrecht, April 1991. EGIS Foundation.
Tom Vijlbrief and Peter van Oosterom. The GEO system: An extensible GIS. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, pages 40–50, Charleston, South Carolina, August 1992. International Geographical Union IGU.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Clementini, E., Di Felice, P., van Oosterom, P. (1993). A small set of formal topological relationships suitable for end-user interaction. In: Abel, D., Chin Ooi, B. (eds) Advances in Spatial Databases. SSD 1993. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 692. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56869-7_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-56869-7_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-56869-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47765-5
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive