A comparison of methods for representing topological relationships

In the field of spatial information systems, a primary need is to develop a sound theory of topological relationships between spatial objects. A category of formal methods for representing topological relationships is based on point-set theory. In this paper, a high level calculus-based method is compared with such point-set methods. It is shown that the calculus-based method is able to distinguish among finer topological configurations than most of the point-set methods. The advantages of the calculus-based method are the direct use in a calculus-based spatial query language and the capability of representing topological relationships among a significant set of spatial objects by means of only five relationship names and two boundary operators.