Local Topological Relationships for Complex Regions

Topological relationships between spatial objects are important for querying, reasoning, and indexing of data within spatial databases. These relationships are qualitative and respond to questions about the relative positions (e.g., disjointedness or containment) of spatial objects. Several models have been proposed that effectively define formal sets of topological relationships between simple spatial data types. The generalization of topological relationship models to complex spatial data types, which are roughly defined as multi-component versions of their simple counterparts, has raised awareness of the fact that these models only provide a global view of topological relationships whereas details of the topological relationships between individual components of the spatial objects involved are often ignored. In this paper, we introduce a fine-grained view on topological relationships between complex regions. Our model focuses on leveraging information about the local topological relationships that hold between the components of two spatial objects, thereby providing a localized view of the overall global topological relationship.