Many disciplines are concerned with manipulating geometric (or spatial) objects in the computer such as geology, cartography, computer aided design (CAD), etc. and each of these have developed their own data structures and techniques, often independently. Nevertheless, in many cases the object types and the spatial queries are similar, and this book attempts to find a common theme.

The book starts with some of the basics of manipulating coordinate representations so that the resulting object descriptions may be usefully combined and queried. The first chapter should be of value to...