Representation And Reasoning Of Spatial Topological Relations Based On Cognition

GIS (geographical information system) has been widely used in many fields, such as resource research, evaluation, management and inspection; city management, city lay-out, municipal works, administrative management, spatial decision, disaster evaluation and forecast, land management and utilization, and traffic, agriculture, public security, etc. But the development of spatial analytical function of GIS is slow. Meanwhile, spatial analyses are based on the spatial target location, attribution expression and complex spatial relation expression between targets. In order to improve the capability of spatial analyses, the description and expression of spatial relations must be solved. Therefore, the research of spatial topological relationship has become a hot point in the research of GIS. Qualitative spatial reasoning that is generated by combining qualitative reasoning, spatial reasoning and artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hotspot in the research of AI. Different from the research of structure, action, function and their interconnections of physical systems in qualitative physics, qualitative spatial reasoning analyzes and processes the human cognition of geometric spatial common-sense knowledge. Different from the research of modeling, descriptions, representations, relations analyzing and processing of spatial objects in spatial reasoning researching, qualitative spatial reasoning treats the qualitative characters and qualitative relations of spatial objects. Qualitative spatial reasoning researches representation and processing of human's qualitative cognition for spatial objects and their relations in geometric space. In recent years, spatial reasoning has great development, at the same time it promotes the development of GIS that has become the most widely and mature application domain of spatial reasoning. Hence, the research of the spatial topological relationship and qualitative reasoning has important academic and practical scene in advancing the development of GIS.This paper applies spatial reasoning method to spatial relational analysis by studying the center problem of GIS-spatial topological relationship. In the foundation of combinative reasoning of topological relationship based on hierarchical cognition, hierarchy representation methods and hierarchy reasoning methods of spatial topological relations are researched, and the reasoning resolving algorithm for spatial constraint satisfactory problem is researched too.Firstly, the basic conception, investigation background, content and actuality of qualitative spatial representation of topological relations and qualitative spatial reasoning are introduced, and the related study fields are confirmed.Secondly, based on the point-set topology and ontology, representation methods for spatialtopological relations are researched. It is proved that RCC model, n-intersection model and classification invariant model have the same classification capability for topological relations between 2-dimensional spatial areas; That 4-intersection model is necessary and sufficient for classifying topological relations between 2-dimensional spatial areas is proved, then these 3 different methods are unified. From the aspect of human cognition, HBM (Hierarchy-based Method), a new method for classifying topological relations, is present based on hierarchical cognition. The classification capability of HBM is as strong as that of CBM, and is not weaker than that of any model in RCC model, n-intersection model (4IM, 9IM, DE₄IM, DE₉IM) and classification invariant model.Further, the hierarchy representation method and the hierarchy reasoning method of spatial topological relations are present, and a reasoning resolving algorithm for spatial constraint satisfactory problem that is more efficient than path-consistency algorithm is given.Finally, a prototype system for topological reasoning is built and the correctness of the system is validated.