Topology
Explicitly stores boundary, co-boundary, and containment relationships
- Allows higher-level adjacency and connectedness relationships to be efficiently derived
Advantages:
- Eliminates redundant storage of coordinates
- Accelerates geometric calculations by eliminating extensive searching and coordinate comparisons
- Provides “glue” that ties primitives together and helps ensure consistency
Disadvantages:
- Requires a modest amount of additional storage space
- Topological errors can disrupt algorithms that rely on topological relationships
The SEDRIS DRM currently supports 2D topology, with two extensions that provide limited 3D support:
- The Edges connected to a node can be organized into an ordered collection of ordered groups
- An Edge can bound zero or more faces