Changes in Topological Relations when Splitting and Merging Regions

Max Egenhofer and Dominik Wilmsen
12th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, Vienna, Austria,
A. Riedl, W. Kainz, and G. Elmes (eds.), Springer, pp. 339-352, 2006.

Abstract

This paper addresses changes in topological relations as they occur when splitting a region into two. It derives systematically what qualitative inferences can be made about binary topological relations when one region is cut into two pieces. The new insights about the possible topological relations obtained after splitting regions form a foundation for high-level spatio- temporal reasoning without explicit geometric information about each object's shapes, as well as for transactions in spatio-temporal databases that want to enforce consistency constraints.

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