Abstract:
Qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) studies the spatial relations of objects in the space. Most QSR research work aims at the spatial relations between single dimensional objects (i.e. region-region relation or line-line relation). Spatial relation of multi-dimensional objects is the situation that point, line and region objects appear in one scene at the same time. Spatial relation of multi-dimensional objects is very common in geographical information systems (GIS). Qualitative spatial relation of multi-dimensional objects has very important theoretical meaning and practical value, but very few work in QSR was focused on it before. By improving the previous research on multi-dimensional region connection calculus model, a multi-dimensional topological model (i.e. MRCC5) is given, and the complexity of its constraints satisfaction problem is studied. The multi-dimensional extension of qualitative size relation called MDS model is proposed, its reasoning problem is also investigated. Based on the above work, a model which combines RCC5 and MDS is proposed, so does its reasoning algorithm. This work extends the related work in qualitative spatial reasoning to the multi-dimensional field. The reasoning of multi-dimensional topological relation is improved. It is the first time that multi-dimensional size relation model and relation model integrating topology and size are studied.