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Representing Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries

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Encyclopedia of GIS

Synonyms

Egg-yolk Calculus; Representing Regions with Broad Boundaries

Definition

The problem of vagueness permeates almost every domain of knowledge representation. In the spatial domain, this is certainly true, for example it is often hard to determine a region’s boundaries (e.g. “southern England”). Vagueness of spatial concepts can be distinguished from that associated with spatially situated objects and the regions they occupy. An adequate treatment of vagueness in spatial information needs to account for vague regions as well as vague relationships. Although there has been some philosophical debate concerning whether vague objects can exist,it is assumed here that they do, and some techniques for handling them are presented, specifically for considering the mereotopological relationships that may hold between such objects.

Historical Background

A number of approaches to representing and reasoning about regions with crisp boundaries had been developed by the mid 1990s (Egenhofer...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Anthony G. Cohn

Authors
  1. Anthony G. Cohn
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Shashi Shekhar

  2. Management Science and Information Systems Department, Rutgers Business School, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, USA

    Hui Xiong

  3. Department of Management Sciences, Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Xun Zhou

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Cohn, A.G. (2017). Representing Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_1121

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