A COMPARISON OF METHODS FOR REPRESENTING TOPOLOGICAL RELATIONSHIPS

In the held of spatial information systems, a primary need is to devel op a sound theory of topological relationships between spatial objects . A category of formal methods for representing topological relationsh ips is based on point-set theory. In this paper, a high level calculus -based method is compared with such point-set methods. It is shown tha t the calculus-based method is able to distinguish among finer topolog ical configurations than most of the point-set methods. The advantages of the calculus-based method are the direct use in a calculus-based s patial query language and the capability of representing topological r elationships among a significant set of spatial objects by means of on ly five relationship names and two boundary operators.