Similarity is the assessment of deviation from equivalence. Spatial similarity is complex due to the numerous constraining properties of geographic objects and their embedding in space. Among these properties, the spatial relations between geographic objects—topological, directional, and metrical—are critical, because they capture the essence of a scene’s structure. These relations can be categ...

Approaches for modeling graded spatial relations abound in the literature on image processing and on geographic information systems. In contrast, few proposals have addressed the use of degrees in application contexts where inference plays a central role. We argue that the use of degrees is nonetheless natural in such contexts, and may enhance the application potential of qualitative spatial re...

Whether visual spatial attention can be split to several discontinuous locations concurrently is still an open and intensely debated question. We address this question in the domain of spatial language use by comparing two existing and three newly proposed computational models. All models are assessed regarding their ability to account for human acceptability ratings for how well a given spatia...

Two sets of fundamental properties which a spatial representation should describe are the position, extent, and orientation of objects, and topological and directional relations between objects. In previous approaches, the formalization of a particular property, such as topological spatial relations, has often been studied as an independent problem. The resulting theories have been elegant and ...

We compared the contribution of featural information and second-order spatial relations (spacing between features) in face processing. A fully factorial design has the same or different "features" (eyes, mouth, and nose) across two successive displays, whereas, orthogonally, the second-order spatial relations between those features were the same or different. The range of such changes matched t...

Vendors of database software are adding spatial capabilities to their products. This paper compares the spatial data types and the spatial relations which are recognized by a set of current commercial RDBMS and layered spatial database management packages. While there is convergence on the notion that databases should handle spatial information, there are both gross and subtle differences in wh...

Automatic acquisition of semantic relations is an important problem in knowledge acquisition. We present a method of spatial structure analysis of candidate Chinese hyponymy based on concept space and use them to identify candidate hyponymy. Firstly a group of candidate hyponymy relations is imported into concept space. Secondly we analyze the basic spatial structure of concept space including ...

The analysis and the description of complex visual scenes characterized by the presence of many objects of interests involve reasoning on spatial relations such as “above”, “below”,“before”, “after” and “between”. In this context, we have defined these semantic concepts in terms of ternary spatial relations and we have formalized them using the clock model which is based on the clock-face divis...

Stretch-A-Sketch is a pen-based drawing program that combines recognition of hand-drawn glyphs with constraint based maintenance of spatial relations. The recognition program identifies hand drawn glyphs, spatial relations between them, and higher-level configurations, such as graph and tree diagrams and floorplan bubble diagrams. Stretch-A-Sketch then maintains the essential relations in these...