From Quantitative Spatial Operator to Qualitative Spatial Relation Using Constructive Solid Geometry, Logic Rules and Optimized 9-IM Model, A Semantic Based Approach
This work addresses spatial reasoning in domains like GIS or urban planning by enabling automated inference of qualitative relations from quantitative data, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing CSG and 9-IM models.
The paper tackles the problem of computing topological relations between spatial objects using Constructive Solid Geometry and the 9-Intersection Model, resulting in a semantic-based approach that stores these relations in an ontology for inference, such as identifying a 'RailStation' when a 'Building' overlaps a 'Railway'.
The Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) is a data model providing a set of binary Boolean operators such as Union, Difference and Intersection. In this work, these operators are used to compute topological relations between objects defined by the constraints of the nine Intersection Model (9-IM) from Egenhofer. With the help of these constraints, we define a procedure to compute the topological relations on CSG objects. These topological relations are Disjoint, Contains, Inside, Covers, CoveredBy, Equals and Overlaps, and are defined in a top-level ontology with a specific semantic definition on relation such as Transitive, Symmetric, Asymmetric, Functional, Reflexive, and Irreflexive. The results of topological relations computation are stored in the ontology allowing after what to infer on these topological relationships. In addition, logic rules based on the Semantic Web Language allows the definition of logic programs that define which topological relationships have to be computed on which kind of objects. For instance, a "Building" that overlaps a "Railway" is a "RailStation".