Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Directional Relations

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of GIS

  • 87 Accesses

Synonyms

Cardinal direction relations; Direction relations; Orientation relations

Definition

Directional relations are qualitative spatial relations that describe how an object or a region is placed relative to other objects or regions. This knowledge is expressed using symbolic (qualitative) and not numerical (quantitative) terms. For instance, north, southeast, front, and back-right are directional relations. Such relations are used to describe and constrain the relative positions of objects or regions and can be used to pose queries such as “Find all objects/regions a, b, and c such that a is north of b and b is southeast of c.”

Historical Background

Qualitative spatial relations (QSRels) approach commonsense knowledge and reasoning about space using symbolic and qualitative rather than numerical and quantitative terms and methods (Hernández 1994) (see also reference to Qualitative Spatial Reasoningentry). QSRels have found applications in many diverse scientific areas such as...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 1,599.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 1,999.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Allen JF (1983) Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Commun ACM 26(11):832–843

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Chang S-K, Jungert E (eds) (1996) Symbolic projection for image information retrieval and spatial reasoning. Academic Press, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Cicerone S, Di Felice P (2004) Cardinal directions between spatial objects: the pairwise-consistency problem. Inf Sci 164(1–4):165–188

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Clementini E, Billen R (2006) Modeling and computing ternary projective relations between regions. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 18(6):799–814

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clementini E, Di Felice P, Hernandez D (1997) Qualitative representation of positional information. Artif Intell 95(2):317–356

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Clementini E, Skiadopoulos S, Billen R, Tarquini F (2010) A reasoning system of ternary projective relations. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 22(2): 161–178

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frank AU (1996) Qualitative spatial reasoning: cardinal directions as an example. Int J Geogr Inf Sci 10(3):269–290

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freksa C (1992) Using orientation information for qualitative spatial reasoning. In: Proceedings of COSIT’92, Piza. LNCS, vol 639, pp 162–178. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bibtex/conf/gis/Freksa92

  • Glasgow J, Papadias D (1992) Computational imagery. Cogn Sci 16:355–394

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Goyal R (2000) Similarity assessment for cardinal directions between extended spatial objects. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Spatial Information Science and Engineering, University of Maine

    Google Scholar 

  • Hernández D (1994) Qualitative representation of spatial knowledge. LNCS, vol 804. Springer, Berlin

    Google Scholar 

  • Ligozat G (1993) Qualitative triangulation for spatial reasoning. In: Proceedings of COSIT’93, Elba Island. LNCS, vol 716, pp 54–68

    Google Scholar 

  • Ligozat G (1998) Reasoning about cardinal directions. J Vis Lang Comput 9:23–44

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu W, Li S (2011) Reasoning about cardinal directions between extended objects: the NP-hardness result. Artif Intell 175(18):2155–2169

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Liu W, Zhang X, Li S, Ying M (2010) Reasoning about cardinal directions between extended objects. Artif Intell 174(12–13):951–983

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Mukerjee A, Joe G (1990) A qualitative model for space. In: Proceedings of AAAI’90, Boston, pp 721–727. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bibtex/conf/aaai/MukerjeeJ90

  • Papadias D (1994) Relation-based representation of spatial knowledge. Ph.D. thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens

    Google Scholar 

  • Papadias D, Sellis TK (1994) Qualitative representation of spatial knowledge in two-dimensional space. VLDB J 3(4):479–516

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peuquet DJ, Ci-Xiang Z (1987) An algorithm to determine the directional relationship between arbitrarily-shaped polygons in the plane. Pattern Recognit 20(1):65–74

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schlieder C (1995) Reasoning about ordering. In: Proceedings of COSIT’95, Semmering. LNSC, vol 988, pp 341–349

    Google Scholar 

  • Scivos A, Nebel B (2001) Double-crossing: decidability and computational complexity of a qualitative calculus for navigation. In: Proceedings of COSIT’01, Morro Bay. LNCS, vol 2205, pp 431–446. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/rec/bibtex/conf/cosit/ScivosN01

  • Skiadopoulos S, Koubarakis M (2004) Composing cardinal direction relations. Artif Intell 152(2):143–171

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Skiadopoulos S, Koubarakis M (2005) On the consistency of cardinal directions constraints. Artif Intell 163(1):91–135

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Skiadopoulos S, Giannoukos C, Sarkas N, Vassiliadis P, Sellis T, Koubarakis M (2005) Computing and managing cardinal direction relations. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 17(12):1610–1623

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skiadopoulos S, Sarkas N, Sellis T, Koubarakis M (2007) A family of directional relation models for extended objects. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 19(8): 1116–1130

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Peloponnese, Tripoli, Greece

    Spiros Skiadopoulos

Authors
  1. Spiros Skiadopoulos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Spiros Skiadopoulos .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Shashi Shekhar

  2. Management Science and Information Systems Department, Rutgers Business School, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, USA

    Hui Xiong

  3. Department of Management Sciences, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Xun Zhou

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this entry

Cite this entry

Skiadopoulos, S. (2017). Directional Relations. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_1539

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation