Many fundamental geoscience concepts and tasks require advanced spatial knowledge about the topology, orientation, shape, and size of spatial objects. Besides topological and distance relations, cardinal directions also can play a prominent role in the determination of qualitative spatial relations; one of the facets of spatial objects is the determination of relative positioning of objects. In...

In this paper a visual approach to querying in large spatial databases is presented. A diagrammatic technique utilising a data flow metaphor is used to express different kinds of spatial and non-spatial constraints. Basic filters are designed to represent the various types of queries in such systems. Icons for different types of spatial relations are used to denote the filters. Different granul...

It is widely accepted that spatial reasoning plays a central role in various artificial intelligence applications. In this paper we study a recent, quite expressive model presented by Skiadopoulos and Koubarakis in [28, 29] for qualitative spatial reasoning with cardinal direction relations. We consider some interesting open problems of this formalism, mainly concerning finding tractable, expre...

Summarizing topological relations is fundamental to many spatial applications including spatial query optimization. In this paper, we examine the selectivity estimation for range window query to summarize the four important topological relations: contains, contained, overlap, and disjoint. We propose a novel hybrid histogrammethod which uses the concept of Min-skew partition in conjunction with...

We investigate the effect of spatial categories on visual perception. In three experiments, participants made same/different judgments on pairs of simultaneously presented dot-cross configurations. For different trials, the position of the dot within each cross could differ with respect to either categorical spatial relations (the dots occupied different quadrants) or coordinate spatial relatio...

Puget, Mejino, Detwiler, Franklin and Brinkley introduce their article “Spatialsymbolic Query Engine in Anatomy” [1] by posing a seemingly straightforward anatomy question: “what vital organs would potentially be impacted by a bullet wound to the abdomen?” More than 50 years ago, such a question may well have been included at the end of a yearlong anatomy course in an essay exam. Such an openen...

We present an approach to spatial inference which is based on the procedural semantics of spatial relations. In contrast to qualitative reasoning, we do not use discrete symbolic models. Instead, relations between pairs of objects are represented by parameterized homogeneous transformation matrices with numerical constraints. A textual description of a spatial scene is transformed into a graph ...

A perceived action can be understood only when information about the action carried out and the objects used are taken into account. It was investigated how spatial and functional information contributes to establishing these relations. Participants observed static frames showing a hand wielding an instrument and a potential target object of the action. The 2 elements could either match or mism...

Different models for computing the spatial relations have been developed in the last decade. Separate methods are used for computing topological, directional and distance relations. These models have also been extended in fuzzy domains based on fuzzy or vague objects and less attention has been paid to fuzzy relations. In this paper 8 fuzzy topological relations are computed with the help of 1D...