Computing the topological relationship of complex regions

Abstract

Topological predicates between spatial objects have always been a main area of research on spatial data handling, reasoning, and query languages. The focus of research has definitely been on the design of and reasoning with these predicates, whereas implementation issues have been largely neglected. Besides, design efforts have been restricted to simplified abstractions of spatial objects like single points, continuous lines, and simple regions. In this paper, we present a general algorithm which is based on the well known plane-sweep paradigm and determines the topological relationship between two given complex regions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.