A formal framework to represent spatial knowledge

Visual representations are an essential element in human–computer interaction and can be conceived as a collection of graphical objects arranged in a two-dimensional space. It is quite natural to model visual representations through the qualitative relationships holding between their objects, and therefore, qualitative spatial relations are a fundamental way of representing spatial knowledge. To this aim, in this paper we present a framework of qualitative spatial relations providing a general, domain-independent approach to specify visual representations.