Saving space: a unified approach for representing and reasoning over different qualitative spatial relations

A unified framework is presented for representation and reasoning over qualitative spatial relations. The approach builds on our earlier formalism for handling topological relations (B. El-Geresy, 1997; B. El-Geresy and A. Abdelmoty, 1997). It is shown how the formalism proposed is expressive enough to represent different types of relations in the orientation space, namely, extrinsic and intrinsic and to proximity relations. The approach proposed is applicable to objects of different types and can be used to reason over different space resolutions and granularities of relations. The main advantages of this work is that it offers a unified platform for handling different relations in the qualitative space which is a step towards developing general spatial reasoning engines for large spatial databases