Deriving Direction Relations Between Uncertain Regions from Topological Relations

Uncertain spatial relations are fundamental to querying and handling uncertain spatial data.However,there is a lack of models and approaches about uncertain relations to satisfy the requirements of many applications.In this study,the regions with broad boundaries are adopted first to model multi-source uncertain spatial data,and then the topology and direction between crisp regions are combined to represent the topological and direction relations related to uncertain regions.Finally,a method is presented to derive the symbolic directions concerned with uncertain regions from the corresponding symbolic description of topological relations according to the underlying knowledge between topology and direction.The derivation is a helpful complementary to current reasoning methods,and can be used to check inconsistencies of spatial data,handle spatial data query languages,and evaluate the similarity of spatial data.