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Nectaria Tryfona and and
Max Egenhofer
Heterogeneous geographic databases contain multiple views of the same geographic objects at different levels of spatial resolution which must be consistent with each other. This paper develops a formal method of assessing consistency of topological relations in R2 at a high level of abstraction, over complexly structured spatial objects that form networks. Networks are a frequently used data type in geographic applications where, for instance, a river with its tributaries and lakes is considered a single spatial object. The relationships between such a network and another spatial object are often used as criteria for describing the consistency in multi-scale geographic applications. The proposed model includes computational methods to determine when two networks are the same or not. The model is further extended to cover the relationships between a network and another spatial object, such as a region or a line. These methods will play an important role in the assessment of spatial similarity of scenes with complex configurations including roads and urban areas, paths, and other linear geographic features.