Spatial representation and reasoning is a central component of medical informatics. The spatial concepts most often used in medicine are not the quantitative, point-based concepts of classical geometry, but rather qualitative relations among extended objects such as body parts. A mereotopology is a formal theory of qualitative spatial relations, such as parthood and connection. This paper consi...

Algebras over spatial relations have become an important aspect of spatial reasoning for retrieving and handling large and complex spatial data sets. While such spatial relations play a fundamental role in specifying constraints in a spatial query language, there has been little concern as to whether existing spatial-relation algebras are cognitively plausible. In order to construct more intuit...

Various relation-based systems, concerned with the qualitative representation and processing of spatial knowledge, have been developed in numerous application domains. In this paper we identify the common concepts underlying qualitative spatial knowledge representation, we compare the representational properties of the different systems and we outline the computational tasks involved in relatio...

Deaf subjects who use American Sign Language as their primary language generated visual mental images faster than hearing nonsigning subjects when stimuli were initially presented to the right hemisphere. Deaf subjects exhibited a strong right hemisphere advantage for image generation using either categorical or coordinate spatial relations representations. In contrast, hearing subjects showed ...

Operations and description for spatial relations are important for GIS. At the present, investigations about them are mainly based on 9-intersection (9I) model for spatial relations. However, due to the infinity of the complements of objects in the model, it is difficult to directly capture the complements of objects. Therefore, even though most of spatial relations could be defined in the SDTS...

9-intersection model is the most popular framework used for formalizing the spatial relations between two spatial objects A and B. It transforms the topological relationships between two simple spatial objects A and B into point-set topology problem in terms of the intersections of A’s boundary (A), interior (A) and exterior (A) with B’s boundary ( B), interior (B) and exterior (B). It was sh...

Previous work has demonstrated a distinction between maintenance of two types of spatial information in working memory (WM): spatial locations and spatial relations. While a body of work has investigated the neural mechanisms of sensory-based information like spatial locations, little is known about how spatial relations are maintained in WM. In two experiments, we used fMRI to investigate the ...

Qualitative spatial reasoning is an important analysis method for spatial information in GIS and other applications. Recently, the integration of two spatial relations in a model is a hot topic in qualitative spatial reasoning. The combinations of more than three relations and multi-types of objects are very useful for solving practical problems, but neither of them has been studied before. Fir...

Spatial relations are becoming an important aspect of spatial access methods because of the increasing interest on qualitative spatial information processing. In this paper we show how queries involving spatial relations can be transformed to range queries and implemented in existing DBMSs. We provide a performance analysis of Band Rtree indexing methods to support such queries and we evaluate ...

Formal methods for the description of spatial relations can be based on mathematical theories of order. Subdivisions of land are represented as partially ordered sets (posets), a model that is general enough to answer spatial queries about inclusion and containment of spatial areas. After a brief introduction to the basic concepts of posets and lattices, their applications to modeling spatial r...