Abstract: Many methods of automatically detecting the spatial conflicts in spatial datasets have been proposed in recent years, but these methods can't work well in detecting the spatial conflicts of incremental updating, therefore, a method to detect the topological conflicts in the settlement incremental updating is studied. Firstly, the character of topological conflicts in the process of settlement incremental updating is analyzed, showing that the conflicts was produced in the neighborhood of updated object; secondly, the grid index relation in the detecting area is built, and the grid set that the updated settlement occupied is expressed as the neighborhood area of the updated settlement; thirdly, searching the features that are located in the grid set which expresses the neighborhood of the updated settlement, and put these features as the candidate set to detect the conflicts; finally, the topological relation between the updated settlement and the feature in the related candidate set is calculated, and by matching the calculating result with the conflict rules to judge the topological conflict. Test illustrates that the method confining the detecting region in the neighborhood of updated object can effectively detect the topological conflicts in the process of settlement incremental updating, and it is also efficient in practical application.