“…Its functions in spatial database construction (Kim and Um, 1999), qualitative spatial reasoning (Frank, 1996;Sharma, 1996;Clementini et al, 1997;Mitra, 2002;Wolter and Lee, 2010;Mossakowski, 2012), spatial computation (Ligozat, 1998;Bansal, 2011) and spatial retrieval (Papadias and Theodoridis, 1997;Hudelot et al, 2008) have attracted researchers' interest. Direction relation has also been used in many practical fields (Zimmermann and Freksa, 1996;Kuo et al, 2009), such as combat operations (direction relation helps soldiers to identify, locate, and predict the location of enemies), driving (direction relation helps drivers to avoid other vehicles), and aircraft piloting (direction relation assists pilots to avoid terrain, other aircrafts and environmental obstacles).…”