关键词: 空间关系, 集成表达, 拓扑关系, 方向关系, 距离关系

Abstract: Spatial relations play an important role in spatial query，analysis and reasoning.Spatial relations are categorized into three types of relations，namely topological，directional and distance relations.This paper is concentrated on the integrated representation of these three relations.For this purpose，a strategy of decomposition and combination is employed.At first，topological relations between two regions are decomposed into a set of basic（or local） topological relations（also called intersection components）.Further，local directional and local distance relations are defined based on two adjacent intersection components.Meanwhile，corresponding computational methods are presented for the differentiation of local topological，directional and distance relations.On this basis，the combination of these three local relations can be obtained with an ordered set of local topological relation being a most basic information chain，which is used to incorporate local direction and local distance.In this way，other metric information can also be directly defined and combined into the integrated representation.Finally，the implementation of this integrated representation is provided to illustrate the rational of the proposed approach in this paper.

Key words: spatial relations, integrated representation, topological relation, directional relation, distance relation