Qualitative Spatial Change

Antony Galton

Published by Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 0-19-823397-3.

The blurb from the back cover

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 representation and 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 organisation of our spatio-temporal concepts. This theory will cover time, space, objects in space, their spatial attributes, changes in these attributes, and the temporal structure of those changes. In this book each of these topics is given a chapter to itself, and a 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.

Chapter Headings

Review

Lars Kulik in Künstliche Intelligenz, 4/02 (October 2002), p.44.
[Quotation from the review: "[T]his book is a little gem and should not be missing from any library" - librarians please note!]


Antony Galton
Last modified: Fri Jul 22 12:12:57 BST 2005