Qualitative Change to 3-Valued Regions

Regions which evolve over time are a significant aspect of many phenomena in geographic information science. Examples include areas in which a measured value (e.g. temperature, salinity, height, etc.) exceeds some threshold, as well moving crowds of people or animals. In many cases the monitoring techniques used to detect such regions cannot assign exact boundaries and the location is thus subject to uncertainty. There is already a well-developed theory of change to regions involving actions such as splitting and merging, but such work is generally limited to regions with crisp boundaries. In this paper we develop a formal model of change for regions under uncertainty. We extend earlier work which used trees to represent the topological configuration of a system of crisp regions, by introducing trees with an additional clustering operation on particular nodes as a way of modeling spatial relationships of multiple certain areas surrounded by a larger uncertain area. One significant appl...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: GISCIENCE
• Authors: Matt Duckham, John G. Stell, Maria Vasardani, Michael F. Worboys
• Keywords: Assign Exact Boundaries, Crisp Regions, GIS, GISCIENCE 2010, Regions Involving Actions