A general framework to implement topological relations on composite regions

Many GIS (Geographic Information Systems) handle composite geometries, i.e. geometries made of the union of simple shapes. Recent works show that relations between composite regions can be modelled with the well-known 9-Intersection Method (9IM). In this case, each relation is represented by a matrix. The proposed paper presents a general method to deduce the topological relations between the parts of regions from the matrix representation. Thus relations between composite regions could be easily implemented.