Uncertainty handling in spatial relationships

Abstract

It is recognized that the existing spatial relations do not cover the areas of metrics (i.e. to what degree are two objects A, B overlapping, or to what degree they meet), and uncertainty (i.e. objects A, B overlap significantly, object A is far away from B etc.). The goal of the paper is to deal with the uncertainty of spatial relationships on the assumption of crisp spatial objects. To achieve our goal we investigate the combination of spatial relationships with metric properties. For topological relations our interest refers to the degree of overlapping and adjacency between two spatial objects. For direction and distance relationships we would like to be able to model smooth and continuous transitions between different directions and between different concepts of distance (e.g. far and very far), respectively. All these applications embody the inherent property of uncertainty. We use fuzzy methodologies for modeling these uncertainty features. Also a query processing scheme for binary spatial relationships with uncertainty is presented. © 2000 ACM.