Preserving Local Topological Relationships

Topological relationships between objects in space are of great importance in many disciplines. Recently, topological relationships have been defined for complex spatial objects. However, this definition only expresses topological relationships between complex spatial objects as a whole (global view); therefore, topological information between the individual components (local view) that compose the objects is lost. In this paper we propose a novel, hybrid model of topological relationships for composite regions that provides access to the global topological relationships as well as the local topological relationships that exist between the simple regions that are the components of the composite regions involved