Tom Bruns and
Max Egenhofer Seventh International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling (SDH '96), Delft, The Netherlands,
M.-J. Kraak and M. Molenaar (eds.), pp. 4A.31-42, August 1996.
Abstract
Similarity is the assessment of deviation from equivalence.
Spatial similarity is complex due to the numerous constraining
properties of geographic objects and their embedding in space.
Among these properties, the spatial relations between geographic
objects---topological, directional, and metrical---are critical,
because they capture the essence of a scene's structure. These
relations can be categorized as a basis for similarity assessment.
This paper describes a computational method to formally assess the
similarity of spatial scenes based on the ordering of spatial
relations. One scene is transformed into another through a sequence
of gradual changes of spatial relations. The number of changes
required yields a measure that is compared against others, or
against a pre-existing scale. Two scenes that require a large
number of changes are less similar than scenes that require fewer
changes.
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Tom Bruns and
Max Egenhofer