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Multi‐Scale Qualitative Location: A Topology‐Based Model
Author(s) -
Du Shihong,
Feng ChenChieh,
Wang Qiao,
Guo Luo
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/tgis.12058
Subject(s) - polygon (computer graphics) , frame of reference , scale (ratio) , reference frame , partition (number theory) , topology (electrical circuits) , object based spatial database , frame (networking) , computer science , spatial relation , mathematics , geography , spatial analysis , artificial intelligence , spatial database , cartography , combinatorics , remote sensing , telecommunications , physics , quantum mechanics
Qualitative locations describe spatial objects by relating the spatial objects to a frame of reference (e.g. a regional partition in this study) with qualitative relations. Existing models only formalize spatial objects, frames of reference, and their relations at one scale, thus limiting their applicability in representing location changes of spatial objects across scales. A topology‐based, multi‐scale qualitative location model is proposed to represent the associations of multiple representations of the same objects with respect to the frames of reference at different levels. Multi‐scale regional partitions are first presented to be the frames of reference at multiple levels of scale. Multi‐scale locations are then formalized to relate multiple representations of the same objects to the multiple frames of reference by topological relations. Since spatial objects, frames of reference, and topological relations in qualitative locations are scale dependent, scale transformation approaches are presented to derive possible coarse locations from detailed locations by incorporating polygon merging, polygon‐to‐line and polygon‐to‐point operators.