Qualitative Spatial Change

Spatial change occurs whenever objects possess different spatial attributes at different times. This book discusses in detail the ingredients for a theory of qualitative spatial change: time, space, objects, their spatial attributes, and how these can vary. It provides a solid formal and theoretical basis for the computational modelling of spatial change.

This book is a contribution to the emerging discipline of Qualitative Spatial Information Theory. The discipline has arisen from a realization that traditional quantitative techniques for the analysis of spatial phenomena must be supplemented by a wide range of qualitative methods if we are to use information technology effectively to further our capacity for handling spatio-temporal information. Such qualitative methods must be supported by a body of theory concerning the nature and organization of our spatio-temporal concepts. This theory will cover time, space, objects in space, their spatial attributes, changes in those attributes, and the temporal structure of those changes. In this book each topic is given a chapter to itself, and theory of qualitative spaces as partitions of quantitative spaces is developed in detail, and applied to numerous particular cases. The theory thus provides a uniform basis for the further development of formal and computational theories of spatial change.