Modelling Spatial Structures

Data is spatial if it contains references to space. We can easily detect explicit references, for example coordinates, but we cannot detect whether data implicitly contains references to space, and whether it has properties of spatial data, if additional semantic information is missing. In this paper, we propose a graph model that meets typical properties of spatial data. We can, by the comparison of a graph representation of a data set to the graph model, decide whether the data set (implicitly or explicitly) has these typical properties of spatial data.