An Effcient Method for Calculating Qualitative Spatial Relations

Qualitative spatial relations are widelyused in geospatial ontologies, geospatial (semantic) webservices, spatial description logics etc. Methodology to obtain qualitative spatial relations (especially complex spatial relations) from Geographical information system (GIS)has not been studied in previous literatures. An effcientmethod for calculating complex qualitative spatial relations is discussed here. First, the multi-granularities approximate representation of spatial objects is proposed,it is designed for GIS object types (such as polygon),and requires less process time. Then some algorithms forcalculating complex spatial relations based on the multigranularities approximate representation are given. Finally, this method is implemented and used to obtain topology and direction relations from world map. The analysisand test results show that this method supports complexand integrated spatial relations and requires less processtime than traditional method. This method is suitablefor obtaining spatial relations for geospatial ontologies andother applications.