Extension of RCC*-9 to Complex and Three-Dimensional Features and Its Reasoning System

Abstract

RCC*-9 is a mereotopological qualitative spatial calculus for simple lines and regions. RCC*-9 can be easily expressed in other existing models for topological relations and thus can be viewed as a candidate for being a “bridge” model among various approaches. In this paper, we present a revised and extended version of RCC*-9, which can handle non-simple geometric features, such as multipolygons, multipolylines, and multipoints, and 3D features, such as polyhedrons and lower-dimensional features embedded in R3. We also run experiments to compute RCC*-9 relations among very large random datasets of spatial features to demonstrate the JEPD properties of the calculus and also to compute the composition tables for spatial reasoning with the calculus.