Max Egenhofer and Robert Franzosa International Journal of Geographical Information Systems 5 (2): 161-174, 1991.
Abstract
Practical needs in the realm of Geographic Information Systems
(GISs) have driven the efforts to investigate formal and sound
methods to describe spatial relations. After an introduction of the
basic ideas and notions of topology, a novel theory of topological
spatial relations between sets is developed in which the relations
are defined in terms of the intersections of the boundaries and
interiors of two sets. By considering empty and
non-empty as the values of the intersections, a total of
sixteen topological spatial relations are described, each of which
can be realized in R2. This set is reduced to nine
relations if the sets are restricted to spatial regions, a fairly
broad class of subsets of a connected topological space having
application to GIS. It is shown that these relations correspond to
some of the standard set-theoretic and topological spatial
relations between sets such as equality, disjointness, and
containment in the interior.
Full article
Max Egenhofer and Robert Franzosa
