| Abstract: | Direction relations between extended spatial objects are important commonsense knowledge. Skiadopoulos proposed a formal model for representing direction relations
between compound regions (the finite union of simple regions), known as SK-model. It
perhaps is currently one of most cognitive plausible models for qualitative direction information, and has attracted interests from artificial intelligence and geographic information
system. Originating from Allen first using composition table to process time interval constraints; composing has become the key technique in qualitative spatial reasoning to check
the consistency. Due to the massive number of basic directions in SK-model, its composition
becomes extraordinary complex. This paper proposed a novel algorithm for the composition.
Basing the concepts of smallest rectangular directions and its original directions, it transforms the composition of basic cardinal direction relations into the composition of interval
relations corresponding to Allen''s interval algebra. Comparing with existing methods, this
algorithm has quite good dimensional extendibility, that is, it can be easily transferred to
the tridimensional space with a few modifications. |
