Defining Spatial Neighborhoods for 3d Topological Analysis in Indoor Space

Since September 11, 2001, geospatial researchers have been interested in utilizing GIScience technologies to solve geographical questions in micro-scale space in built-environments such as indoor space within a building. The indoor space should be dealt with differently from outdoor space in order to provide integrated and seamless location-based services (Li, 2009). The indoor LBS applications provided in multi-level structures such as buildings require a fundamental geo-spatial functionality to define spatial relationships among 3D entities to describe how individual spatial units interact. Because the 3D query operations are much complex geometric computational problems, this study proposes an alternative method to define the spatial neighborhoods among the 3D objects based on network-based topological representations for analyzing spatial relationships in indoor space. * Corresponding author.