Spatial Reasoning for Environmental Impact Assessment

Abstract:

The potential of Geographic Information Systems has yet to be fully realized. Currently they are severely limited in that they do not provide for any spatial reasoning capability concerning the data they contain. This is partly because GIS data representations are not directly compatible with the predicate logic representations used by existing approaches to spatio-temporal reasoning.
There are many applications where a reasoning capability would offer signific ant benefits, such as the provision of support for the drawing up of environmental impact assessment plans with respect to the siting of factories, noise and air pollution control and effects on flora and fauna. The use of quad tesseral addressing to represent the GIS entities allows space in two, three and higher dimensions to be ``linearized" so that established one-dimensional constraint-based reasoning techniques can be applied. This avoids the combinato rial explosion of directional relations which occurs between entities in two and higher dimensions, as we are able to express relations in terms of ``before", ``equals" and ``after".
Furthermore, conventional raster and vector GIS map ea sily onto this data representation. The technique has been built into a spatial reasoning system, the SPARTA (SPAtial Reasoning using Tesseral Addressing) system which is described in the paper.

B.J.H. Beattie
Tue Nov 21 17:11:01 GMT 1995