A Unified Semantics Space Model

Location-aware systems provide customised services or applications according to users’ locations. While much research has been carried out in developing models to represent location information and spatial relationships, it is usually limited to modelling simple environments (cf. [13,19,3]). This paper proposes a unified space model for more complex environments (e.g., city plan or forest). This space model provides a flexible, expressive, and powerful spatial representation. It also proposes a new data structure – an integrated lattice and graph model – to express comprehensive spatial relationships. This structure not only provides multiple graphs at different abstraction levels, but it also collapses the whole map into smaller local graphs. This mechanism is beneficial in reducing the complexity of creating and maintaining a map and improving the efficiency of path finding algorithms.