Abstract
We study the recent proposal of Goyal and Egenhofer who presented a model for qualitative spatial reasoning about cardinal directions. Our approach is formal and complements the presentation of Goyal and Egenhofer. We focus our efforts on the operation of composition for two cardinal direction relations. We point out that the only published method to compute the composition does not always work correctly. Then we consider progressively more expressive classes of cardinal direction relations and give composition algorithms for these classes. Our theoretical framework allows us to prove formally that our algorithms are correct. Finally, we demonstrate that in some cases, the binary relation resulting from the composition of two cardinal direction relations cannot be expressed using the relations defined by Goyal and Egenhofer.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
B. Bennett. Logical Representations for Automated Reasoning About Spatial Relations. PhD thesis, School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, 1997.
Z. Cui, A.G. Cohn, and D.A. Randell. Qualitative and Topological Relationships in Spatial Databases. In Proceedings of SSD-93, pages 296–315, 1993.
M.J. Egenhofer. Reasoning about Binary Topological Relationships. In Proceedings of SSD-91, pages 143–160, 1991.
B. Faltings. Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Using Algebraic Topology. In Proceedings of COSIT-95, volume 988 of LNCS, 1995.
A.U. Frank. Qualitative Spatial Reasoning about Distances and Directions in Geographic Space. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 3:343–371, 1992.
R. Goyal and M.J. Egenhofer. The Direction-Relation Matrix: A Representation for Directions Relations Between Extended Spatial Objects. In the annual assembly and the summer retreat of University Consortium for Geographic Information Systems Science, June 1997.
R. Goyal and M.J. Egenhofer. Cardinal Directions Between Extended Spatial Objects. IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering, (in press), 2000. Available at http://www.spatial.maine.edu/max/RJ36.html.
P.C. Kanellakis, G.M. Kuper, and P.Z. Revesz. Constraint Query Languages. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 51:26–52, 1995.
M. Koubarakis. The Complexity of Query Evaluation in Indefinite Temporal Constraint Databases. Theoretical Computer Science, 171:25–60, January 1997. Special Issue on Uncertainty in Databases and Deductive Systems, Editor: L.V.S. Lakshmanan.
G. Ligozat. Reasoning About Cardinal Directions. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 9:23–44, 1998.
S. Lipschutz. Set Theory and Related Topics. McGraw Hill, 1998.
D. Papadias. Relation-Based Representation of Spatial Knowledge. PhD thesis, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, 1994.
D. Papadias, N. Arkoumanis, and N. Karacapilidis. On The Retrieval of Similar Configurations. In Proceedings of 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH), 1998.
D. Papadias, Y. Theodoridis, T. Sellis, and M.J. Egenhofer. Topological Relations in the World of Minimum Bounding Rectangles: A Study with R-trees. In Proceedings of ACM SIGMOD-95, pages 92–103, 1995.
C.H. Papadimitriou, D. Suciu, and V. Vianu. Topological Queries in Spatial Databases. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 58(1):29–53, 1999.
D.A. Randell, Z. Cui, and A. Cohn. A Spatial Logic Based on Regions and Connection. In Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Third International Conference (KR’92). Morgan Kaufmann, October 1992.
J. Renz and B. Nebel. On the Complexity of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning: A Maximal Tractable Fragment of the Region Connection Calculus. Artificial Intelligence, 1–2:95–149, 1999.
A.P. Sistla, C. Yu, and R. Haddad. Reasoning About Spatial Relationships in Picture Retrieval Systems. In Proceedings of VLDB-94, pages 570–581, 1994.
S. Skiadopoulos and M. Koubarakis. Qualitative Spatial Reasoning with Cardinal Directions. Submitted for publication, 2001.
K. Zimmermann. Enhancing Qualitative Spatial Reasoning-Combining Orientation and Distance. In Proceedings of COSIT-93, volume 716 of LNCS, pages 69–76, 1993.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Skiadopoulos, S., Koubarakis, M. (2001). Composing Cardinal Direction Relations. In: Jensen, C.S., Schneider, M., Seeger, B., Tsotras, V.J. (eds) Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases. SSTD 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2121. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47724-1_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-47724-1_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42301-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-47724-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive