Region-Based Theories of Space: Mereotopology and Beyond

This chapter focuses on the topological and mereological relations, contact, and parthood, between spatiotemporal regions as axiomatized in so-called mereotopologies. Despite, or because of, their simplicity, a variety of different first-order axiomatizations have been proposed. This chapter discusses their underlying ontological choices and different ways of systematically looking at them. The chapter further gives an overview of the algebraic, topological, and graph-theoretic representations of mereotopological models which help to better understand the model-theoretic consequences of the various ontological choices. While much work on mereotopologies has been primarily theoretical, the focus started shifting towards applications and domain-specific extensions of mereotopology. These aspects will most likely guide the future direction of the field: How can mereotopologies be extended or otherwise adjusted to better suit practical needs? Moreover, the integration of mereotopology into more comprehensive and maybe more pragmatic ontologies of space and time remains another challenge in the field of region-based space.