K-ORDER SPATIAL NEIGHBOURS BASED ON VORONOI DIAGRAM: DESCRIPTION, COMPUTATION AND APPLICATIONS
Renliang Zhao, Zhilin Li · 2002
Spatial neighbouring relation is a very important concept in spatial information science. It has even been regarded as the base of spatial information system. Neighouring information is indispensable for many operations in spatial information system. Therefore, it is significant to describe and acquire such in an efficient way. Most of current concepts of neighbours only involve objects sharing common boundaries. However, spatial neighbours are not restricted to only this type in practical applications. There is still a lack of systematical discussion on the definition and computation of such spatial neighbours. In this paper, a more generalized concept of neighbours and some applications in GIS fields are systematically discussed. A model is developed for a particular type of neighbours, called k-order neighbours using Voronoi diagrams. Several efficient methods for computation of k-order neighbours are developed for different cases. Then some possible applications are discussed including spatial query and neighborhood analysis.