Measuring consistency with respect to topological dependency constraints

In contrast to the enormous development of database management systems to support spatial databases, very little work has been done in evaluating the quality of spatial data in terms of how much they satisfy a set of topo-semantic integrity constraints, in particular, a set of topological dependency constraints. In the same way, mechanisms for enforcing the satisfaction of those constraints are not necessarily available or even feasible. In this paper we propose measures to evaluate the degree of violation of a topological dependency constraint by geometries stored in a spatial database instance. We also propose how these measures can be aggregated to globally evaluate the data quality of a database instance such that they enable to compare database instances in terms of their constraint satisfaction. We provide an experimental evaluation of those measures using synthetic and real data. We validate our measures by i) analyzing their correlation with the semantic distance of topological relations and ii) checking that the more we randomly modify geometries to make database instances inconsistent, the more our global data quality measure decreases, showing its sensibility to the introduced constraint violations.