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International Conference on Spatial Information Theory

COSIT 2013: Spatial Information Theory pp 495–515Cite as

The Topology of Spatial Scenes in ℝ2

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8116))

Abstract

Spatial scenes are abstractions of some geographic reality, focusing on the spatial objects identified and their spatial relations. Such qualitative models of space enable spatial querying, computational comparisons for similarity, and the generation of verbal descriptions. A specific strength of spatial scenes is that they offer a focus on particular types of spatial relations. While past approaches to representing spatial scenes, by recording exhaustively all binary spatial relations, capture accurately how pairs of objects are related to each other, they may fail to distinguish certain spatial properties that are enabled by an ensemble of objects. This paper overcomes such limitations by introducing a model that considers (1) the topology of potentially complexly structured spatial objects, (2) modeling applicable relations by their boundary contacts, and (3) considering exterior partitions and exterior relations. Such qualitative scene descriptions have all ingredients to generate topologically correct graphical renderings or verbal scene descriptions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Science, University of Maine, 5711 Boardman Hall, Orono, ME, 04469-5711, USA

    Joshua A. Lewis, Matthew P. Dube & Max J. Egenhofer

Authors
  1. Joshua A. Lewis
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  2. Matthew P. Dube
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  3. Max J. Egenhofer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University, College Road, LL57 2DG, Bangor, UK

    Thora Tenbrink

  2. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    John Stell

  3. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Harrison Building, North Park Road, EX4 4QF, Exeter, UK

    Antony Galton  & Zena Wood  & 

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Lewis, J.A., Dube, M.P., Egenhofer, M.J. (2013). The Topology of Spatial Scenes in ℝ2 . In: Tenbrink, T., Stell, J., Galton, A., Wood, Z. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01789-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01790-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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