An Integrated Representation Of Line-Region Spatial Relations And Its Application

Spatial relations have always been the basic theory and research focus in GIS, and have been extensively applied in spatial/temporal data mining, image retrieval, the evaluation and control for the quality of map generalization, spatial reasoning in artificial intelligence and the integration and update for multi-source/multi-type/multi-scale spatial data. This thesis is focused on the representation of spatial relations between a line and an area and its application to spatial conflict. Main works can be summarized as follows:1. Existing models of spatial relations including topology, direction and metric, are reviewed in this paper. And their identification ability of the relations between a line and an area is analyzed.2. The hierarchical representation of topological relations between a line and an area is advanced. The line of thought employed in this paper is that the joint topological relations between a line and an area can be described by a combination of finite number of basic relations. Based on this idea, the topological relations between a line and an area are first divided into two levels, i.e. basic relations and compound relations (or multi-intersection relations). A hierarchical approach is proposed for the description and determination of the line-area relations at these two levels. 16 basic relations are identified and 13 of them together form a basis for combinational description of a complex relation. In this approach, a set of topological invariants in hierarchy is defined by means of the concept of spatial set, which is derived from the intersection set between line and area's boundary. These topological invariants are classified into three levels based upon (a) separation number and dimension at the set level, (b) component type at the element level, and (c) sequence at the integrated level. Moreover, the capacity of hierarchical representation for line-area topological relations is increasing.3. An integrated approach is proposed for representing line-area spatial relations based on the 16 basic topological relations that illustrates from three levels in this paper including (a) local topology, local direction relation and distance relation at basic level, (b) sequence of local topology, local direction and distance relation, and (c) the integrated representation of the three relations.4. The conflicts between the roads and the buildings are analyzed. And some rules for judging conflicts are presented. The detection and handling of conflicts has been implemented based on the integrated representation of line-region spatial relations.Finally, this paper makes a summary and presents some issues for future works.