Abstract

This work defines and compares three quantitative content measures of topological relations between spatial objects that consider metric refinements with respect to relative size, distance, and degree of overlapping. These content measures use minimum bounding rectangles (MBRs) as simplified views of spatial objects in order to create an efficient mechanism for characterizing the topological content of spatial configurations. A framework for comparing content measures is presented, which is based on the linear correlation between two similarity rankings: (1) a similarity ranking defined in terms of the distance of content-measure values and (2) a similarity ranking defined in terms of the error of the geometric adjustment between pairs of objects. The linear correlation between similarity rankings is used as indicator of how well the defined content measures characterize topological relations. Such kind of content measures can provide mechanisms for creating efficient methods to describe and access information on the basis of the topological content of spatial configurations. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.