  Analyzing huge amounts of spatial data plays an important role in many
emerging analysis and decision-making domains such as healthcare, urban
planning, agriculture and so on. For extracting meaningful knowledge from
geographical data, the relationships between spatial data objects need to be
analyzed. An important class of such relationships are topological relations
like the connectedness or overlap between regions. While real-world
geographical regions such as lakes or forests do not have exact boundaries and
are fuzzy, most of the existing analysis methods neglect this inherent feature
of topological relations. In this paper, we propose a method for handling the
topological relations in spatial databases based on fuzzy region connection
calculus (RCC). The proposed method is implemented in PostGIS spatial database
and evaluated in analyzing the relationship of diseases as an important
application domain. We also used our fuzzy RCC implementation for fuzzification
of the skyline operator in spatial databases. The results of the evaluation
show that our method provides a more realistic view of spatial relationships
and gives more flexibility to the data analyst to extract meaningful and
accurate results in comparison with the existing methods.
