A graph-based fuzzy linguistic metadata schema for describing spatial relationships

The spatial relationship description among objects is highly desirable for many research areas such as artificial intelligence and image analysis. In this paper we present a novel fuzzy logic method to automatically generate the description of spatial relationships among objects. A new graph-based fuzzy linguistic metadata schema named Snowflake is proposed to describe the topology and metric relationships for a set of objects. Like an artist painting a picture, Snowflake selects one reference object to present the spatial relationships of all the other objects with respect to this reference object. This paper introduces the operations and isomorphism of Snowflake. The paper also demonstrates that Snowflake preserves the rotation invariance and the scale invariance of spatial relationships. Experiments show that Snowflake is an efficient and effective spatial modeling method.