Building fuzzy areal geographical objects from point sets. Issue 6 (10th October 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Guo, Jifa; Du, Shihong
• Is Part Of: Transactions in GIS. Volume 25:Issue 6(2021)
• Page Start: 3067
• Page End: 3087
• Publication Date: 2021-10-10
• Subjects: Geographic information systems -- Periodicals; 910.285
• DOI: 10.1111/tgis.12808
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1361-1682

Abstract

Abstract: Representations of fuzzy geographic objects and analyses of their spatial relationships have received considerable attention in the GIS and spatial database domains over the past 30 years. However, building fuzzy geographical objects from real data is still a challenge. Simple fuzzy areal object models are too restrictive for many applications, and general fuzzy areal models may not be restrictive enough; as a result, the extent of fuzzy regions that satisfy the relevant conditions may be too large to affect the location description and spatial analysis. A condition by which the number of cores is not greater than one is added for the general object model, and an operable method for constructing fuzzy objects from the point set is proposed. Two peak and pass sets are determined for the membership surface by the fuzzy morphometric analysis method. The first set is used to initially divide the footprint of the fuzzy surface into smaller subfootprints, and the second set is used to merge insignificant fuzzy objects with their nearest significant fuzzy objects; thus, unreasonable division is avoided. Cross‐validation is adopted to evaluate the generated fuzzy objects. An experiment is provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.