Spatio-temporal topological relationships between land parcels in cadastral database

There are complex spatio-temporal relationships among cadastral entities. Cadastral spatio-temporal data model should not only describe the data structure of cadastral objects, but also express cadastral spatio-temporal relationships between cadastral objects. In the past, many experts and scholars have proposed a variety of cadastral spatio-temporal data models, but few of them concentrated on the representation of spatiotemporal relationships and few of them make systematic studies on spatiotemporal relationships between cadastral objects. The studies on spatio-temporal topological relationships are not abundant. In the paper, we initially review current approaches to the studies of spatio-temporal topological relationships, and argue that spatio-temporal topological relation is the combination of temporal topology on the time dimension and spatial topology on the spatial dimension. Subsequently, we discuss and develop an integrated representation of spatio-temporal topological relationships within a 3-dimensional temporal space. In the end, based on the semantics of spatiotemporal changes between land parcels, we conclude the possible spatio-temporal topological relations between land parcels, which provide the theoretical basis for creating, updating and maintaining of land parcels in the cadastral database.