Enriching the Qualitative Spatial Reasoning System RCC8

The field of qualitative spatial reasoning is now an active research area in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and also in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Different kinds of spatial relations play an important role in spatial reasoning, spatial analysis, and query languages for geospatial databases. GIS and image databases are often based on the description of relations between spatial regions. One kind of these relations is the topological relations, where the general description of region-region topological relations in detail is still an unsolved issue, although much effort has been done. The eight basic topological relations between two spatial regions are written without any details in the classical form of the spatial reasoning system RCC8: DC, EC, PO, TPP, NTPP, TPPi, NTPPi, and EQ with the names of: DisConnected, Externally Connected, Partial Overlap, Tangential Proper Part, Non-Tangential Proper Part, Tangential Proper Part Inverse, Non-Tangential Proper Part Inverse, and Equally. In some applications, such as GIS and satellite imagery, need to be described in detail to get new spatial information by enriching these topological relations of the RCC8 system. In order to extract all the necessary details at all possible levels and to differentiate between relations of the same kind, multi-level topological relations are introduced by using two concepts: the Separation Number and the Types of Spatial Elements (Points and Lines) of the Boundary-Boundary Intersection Spatial Set (BBISS). In this chapter, the major contribution is the definition of multi-level topological relations to enrich the RCC8 system. The authors focus their research on the four relations EC, PO, TPP, and TPPi, which