Co-location Pattern

Synonyms

Spatial association pattern; Collocation pattern

Definition

A (spatial) co-location pattern P can be modeled by an undirected connected graph where each node corresponds to a non-spatial feature and each edge corresponds to a neighborhood relationship between the corresponding features. For example, consider a pattern with three nodes labeled “timetabling”, “weather”, and “ticketing”, and two edges connecting “timetabling” with “weather” and “timetabling” with “ticketing”. An instance of a pattern P is a set of objects that satisfy the unary (feature) and binary (neighborhood) constraints specified by the pattern's graph. An instance of an example pattern is a set {o ₁, o ₂, o ₃} of three spatial locations where label(o ₁) = “timetabling”, label(o ₂) = “weather”, label(o ₃) = “ticketing” (unary constraints) and dist(o ₁, o ₂) ≤ ε, dist(o ₁, o ₃) ≤ ε (spatial binary constraints). In general, there may be an arbitrary spatial (or spatio‐temporal) constraint specified at each...