Definition
Topology, which is founded on the notion of connectedness, is at the heart of many systems of qualitative spatial relations; since it is possible to define a notion of parthood from connection, and theories of parthood are called mereologies, such combined theories are generally called mereotopologies. The best known set of relations based on a primitive notion of connectedness is the Region Connection Calculus (RCC), which defines several sets of jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint, (JEPD) relations, RCC-5, a purely mereological set, and the more widely used RCC-8 set of eight relations illustrated in Fig. 1. The primitive relation used in RCC (and several related theories) is C(x, y) – true when region x is connected to region y. A largely equivalent set of relations can be defined in the 4-intersection model in which relations between regions are defined in...
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Cohn AG, Hazarika SM (2001) Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning: an overview. Fundam Inf 46(1–2):1–29
Cohn AG, Renz J (2007) Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. In: Lifschitz V, van Harmelen F, Porter F (eds) Handbook of knowledge representation, chap 13. Elsevier, München
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Cohn, A.G. (2017). Mereotopology. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_777
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_777
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