Towards Modeling Locations as Poly-Hierarchies

Location models are formal descriptions of locations (i. e., named sets of geographical positions) as well as of semantic relationships among locations. There exist various location models that vary in the considered location information, their level of detail, the kind of modelled relations and the used formal representation. In fact, more complex location models cover more aspects required for implementing location-aware or location-dependent systems, but also require more complex algorithms. As each application domain requires only a limited set of features, limiting a model to those features helps to improve system performance. In this paper, we discuss a novel location model called location poly-hierarchies that models the belonging of one location to one ore more other locations. Furthermore, we present an approach for creating location poly-hierarchies from a given set of locations.