A computational model for direction relations between spatial objects in GIS

Direction relations between spatial objects have been a research focus in different fields like spatial reasoning, spatial query, GIS, CAD/CAM, and AI. A novel model named Radial model is proposed to obtain both quantitative and qualitative direction relations based on the principle of the ray transmitting as a straight line. The framework of the proposed model is composed of reference point, reference, and target object. Theoretically, we group direction relations into three cases (case I: point/point; case II: point/line and point/area; case III: line/line, line/area and area/area) for calculation based on point-set theory. Additionally, we employ the model in calculating direction relations on the vector and raster spatial data model in GIS.