Compact Representations of Spatial Hierarchical Structures with Support for Topological Queries

José Fuentes-Sepúlveda, Diego Gatica, Gonzalo Navarro, Andrea Rodríguez, and Diego Seco

Among different spatial data models, the topological model for spatial regions explicitly represents common boundaries. This model pursues the efficiency of topology-related queries and the elimination of data redundancy. This paper proposes several space-efficient data structures to support access to the topological representation of two-dimensional regions that are organized in a multi-granular or hierarchical structure, such as the political and administrative partition of a country. In the context of these hierarchies, we focus on queries that search for inclusion, disjointness, and adjacency between regions. The proposed structures build upon compact planar graph embeddings, which show to have a good trade-off between space and time.