Similarity Measurements on Multi-Scale Qualitative Locations

Qualitative representation of spatial locations and their similarity measurements are essential for the analysis of linguistic term-based data. Existing methods have focused on the similarities of spatial relations and spatial scenes but have not considered the variations in geometrical representations and relations over scales. This study developed some new measures to assess the similarities of both single-and multi-scale qualitative locations. Region-and cell-based models were used to formalize qualitative locations of spatial objects with respect to multi-scale frames of reference. The similarities were assessed by integrating the similarities of frames and qualitative relations. The frame similarity measures how two objects are compared considering the common elements that they occupy in the reference frames. Moreover, the similarity of qualitative relation measures how two relations relate two objects to the corresponding elements in the frames. The location similarities at a single level integrate the similarities of the frames and qualitative relations, whereas the location similarities at multiple scales incorporate the variations in qualitative locations over scales. These methods were used to assess location similarities concerning residential areas, roads, and lakes. The results indicated that the location-based measurements can disclose the distributions of the similarities and that the cell-based model is more accurate than the region-based model.National Natural Science Foundation of China [41171297]SSCIARTICLEguoluo2010@163.com6824-8472