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The Computer Journal Advance Access published online on March 1, 2007
The Computer Journal, doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxl086
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning: A Hierarchical Approach

Sanjiang Li1,2,* and Bernhard Nebel2

1 Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
2 Institut für Informatik, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, D-79110 Freiburg, Germany

* Corresponding author: lisanjiang{at}tsinghua.edu.cn

Received 13 April 2006; revised 9 December 2006

The ability to reason in space is crucial for agents in order to make informed decisions. Current high-level qualitative approaches to spatial reasoning have serious deficiencies in not reflecting the hierarchical nature of spatial data and human spatial cognition. This article proposes a framework for hierarchical representation and reasoning about topological information, where a continuous model of space is approximated by a collection of discrete sub-models, and spatial information is hierarchically represented in discrete sub-models in a rough set manner. The work is based on the Generalized Region Connection Calculus theory, where continuous and discrete models of space are coped in a unified way. Reasoning issues such as determining the mereological (part-whole) relations between two rough regions are also discussed. Moreover, we consider an important problem that is closely related to map generalization in cartography and Geographical Information Science. Given a spatial configuration at a finer level, we show how to construct a configuration at a coarser level while preserving the mereological relations.

Key Words: Qualitative spatial reasoning • hierarchical spatial model • Generalized Region Connection Calculus • resolution • map generalization

Handling editors: Zhi-ua Zhou and Ruqian Lu


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