Integrative representation and inference of qualitative locations about points, lines, and polygons

Qualitative knowledge representation of spatial locations and relations is popular in many text-based media, for example, postings on social networks, news reports, and encyclopedia, as representing qualitative spatial locations is indispensable to infer spatial knowledge from them. However, an integrative model capable of handling direction-based locations of various spatial objects is missing. This study presents an integrative representation and inference framework about direction-based qualitative locations for points, lines, and polygons. In the framework, direction partitions of different types of reference objects are first unified to create a partition consisting of cells, segments, and corners. They serve as a frame of reference to locate spatial objects (e.g., points, lines, and polygons). Qualitative relations are then defined to relate spatial objects to the elements in a cell partition, and to form the model of qualitative locations. Last, based on the integrative representation, location-based reasoning mechanism is presented to derive topological relations between objects from their locations, such as point-point, line-line, point-line, point-polygon, line-polygon, and polygon-polygon relations. The presented model can locate any type of spatial objects in a frame of reference composed of points, lines, and polygons, and derive topological relations between any pairs of objects from the locations in a unified method.