Qualitative 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.