Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Integrated Spatial Reasoning In Geographic Information Systems: Combining Topology And Direction, Jayant Sharma

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As Geographic Information Systems (GISs) have gained wider acceptance and application, the interest in spatial modeling and reasoning has deepened. The purpose of a model and reasoning framework is to permit a user to experiment and study causal relationships in the real world by operating on the model only. Traditionally GISs employ purely quantitative methods to represent and infer spatial information. This approach has serious shortcomings when dealing with qualitative spatial information, which may be incomplete or imprecise and does not contain knowledge of the geometry of the spatial objects, which humans are particularly adept at utilizing in their daily …