Abstract
Qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) has many and varied applications among which reasoning about cartographic entities. We focus on reasoning about topological relations for which two approaches can be found in the literature: region-based approaches, for which the basic spatial entity is the spatial region; and point-set approaches, for which spatial regions are viewed as sets of points. We will follow the latter approach and provide a calculus for reasoning about point-like, linear and areal entities in geographic maps. The calculus consists of a constraint-based approach to the calculus-based method (CBM) in (Clementini et al., 1993). It is presented as an algebra alike to Allen’s (1983) temporal interval algebra. One advantage of presenting the CBM calculus in this way is that Allen’s incremental constraint propagation algorithm can then be used to reason about knowledge expressed in the calculus. The algorithm is guided by composition tables and a converse table provided in this contribution.
This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the framework of the Spatial Cognition Priority Program (grants Fr 806-7 and Fr 806-8).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Allen, J.F. (1983). Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals. Communications of the ACM, 26(11), 832–843.
Bennett, B. (1994). Spatial reasoning with propositional logics. In J. Doyle, E. Sandewall, & P. Torasso (Eds.), Principles of knowledge representation and reasoning: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference KR94 (pp. 51–62). Morgan Kaufmann.
Clementini, E., & Di Felice, P. (1995). A comparison of methods for representing topological relationships. Information Sciences, 3, 149–178.
Clementini, E., Di Felice, P., & van Oosterom, P. (1993). A small set of formal topological relationships suitable for end-user interaction. In D. Abel, & B. C. Ooi (Eds.), Advances in spatial databases-Third International Symposium, SSD’93, Singapore (pp. 277–295). Berlin: Springer.
Egenhofer, M. (1991). Reasoning about binary topological relations. In O. Gunther & H.-J. Schek (Eds.), Second Symposium on Large Spatial Databases, Zurich, Switzerland (pp. 143–160). Berlin: Springer.
Egenhofer, M., & Franzosa, R. (1991). Point-set topological spatial relations. International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 5(2), 161–174.
Freksa, C. (1992). Temporal reasoning based on semi-intervals. Artificial Intelligence, 54(1–2), 199–227.
Gotts, N.M. (1996). Topology from a single primitive relation: defining topological properties and relations in terms of connection (Technical Report No. 96_23). University of Leeds: School of Computer Studies.
Pullar, D., & Egenhofer, M. (1988). Toward formal definitions of topological relations among spatial objects. Third International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Sydney, Australia, August 1988.
Randell, D.A., Cui, Z., & Cohn, A. G. (1992). A spatial logic based on regions and connection. Proc 3rd Int. Conf on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Boston, October, 1992.
Renz, J., & Nebel, B. (1998). Spatial reasoning with topological information. In C. Freksa, C. Habel, & K. F. Wender (Eds.), Spatial cognition-An interdisciplinary approach to representation and processing of spatial knowledge. Berlin: Springer.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Isli, A., Cabedo, L.M., Barkowsky, T., Moratz, R. (2000). A Topological Calculus for Cartographic Entities. In: Freksa, C., Habel, C., Brauer, W., Wender, K.F. (eds) Spatial Cognition II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1849. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45460-8_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45460-8_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67584-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45460-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive