A model for representing topological relationships between complex geometric features in spatial databases

Various models for the representation of topological relationships have been developed. The aim of this paper is to show that the set of relationships proposed in [7] (the CBM), for describing topological relationships among two-dimensional simple features, is applicable with few modifications to the case of complex features (that is, areas made up of several components possibly containing holes, lines with self-intersections, and/or more than two endpoints, and so on). The CBM offers a small set of topological relationships with high expressiveness which is proven to be mutually exclusive and complete, and therefore suitable to be embedded in a spatial query language.