Order in Space: A General Formalism for Spatial Reasoning

In this paper we propose a general approach for reasoning in space The approach is com posed of a set of two general constraints to govern the spatial relationships between objects in space and two rules to propagate relationships between those ob jects The reasoning method is applicable to objects of random complexity and in any space dimension The approach is based on a uniform representation of the topology of the space as a connected set of compo nents and the representation of the relationships between those ob jects by the intersection of the space components Several examples are used to illustrate the generality of the proposed method The approach is also shown to be applicable to reasoning in the temporal domain and is used to explain some phenomenon related to the reasoning process namely conceptual neighbourhood and de nite and inde nite compositions A major advantage of the method is that reasoning between objects of any complexity can be achieved in a de nite limited num ber of steps Hence the incorporation of spatial reasoning mechanisms in spatial information systems becomes plausible