9-intersection model is the most popular framework used for formalizing the spatial relations between two spatial objectsA andB. It transforms the topological relationships between two simple spatial objectsA andB into point-set topology problem in terms of the intersections ofA’s boundary (?A), interior (A 0) and (A ?) withB’s boundary (?B), interior (B 0) and exterior (B ?). It is shown in this paper that there exist some limitations of the original 9-intersection model due to its definition of an object’s exterior as its complement, and it is difficult to distinguish different disjoint relations and relations between complex objects with holes, difficult or even impossible to compute the intersections with the two object’s complements (?A∩B ?,A 0∩?B ?,A ?∩?B,A ?∩B 0 andA ?∩B ?)since the complements are infinitive. The authors suggest to re-define the exterior of spatial object by replacing the complement with its Voronoi region. A new Voronoi-based 9-intersection (VNI) is proposed and used for formalizing topological relations between spatial bojects. By improving the 9-intersection model, it is now possible to distinguish disjoint relations and to deal with objects with holes. Also it is possible to compute the exterior-based intersections and manipulate spatial relations with the VNI.
