Acquiring, Representing and Processing Spatial Relations

Abstract

The study of spatial relations has been an important research topic in a number of different domains. As a result several relation-based systems have been developed to represent and process spatial relations. This paper identifies the concepts underlying the representation of spatial relations and outlines the processes involved in relation-based information processing. In the paper we also discuss the need for alternative forms of relation-based representations, and describe the applicability of the results of various scientific areas to the geographic domain. 1. INTRODUCTION This paper studies the multidisciplinary literature related to the perception, representation and processing of spatial relations. The importance of spatial relations has been identified in several areas including: - Vision (extraction of spatial relations from uninterpreted input images, e.g., Ullman, 1984), - Mental and Computational Imagery (spatial image reconstruction from longterm memory representations,...