Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Extracting and Reasoning with Spatial Aggregates

Reasoning about spatial data is a key task in many applications, including geographic information systems, meteorological and fluid-flow analysis, computer-aided design, and protein structure databases. Qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR) provides representational primitives (a spatial "vocabulary") and inference mechanisms for these tasks. It then turns to the data-rich case, where the goal is to derive and manipulate qualitative spatial representations that efficiently and correctly abstract important spatial aspects of the underlying data for use in subsequent tasks. This article focuses on how a particular QSR system, SPATIAL AGGREGATION, can help answer spatial queries for scientific and engineering data sets.