Maintaining the consistency of a multi-scale spatial relationship is an important step in conflict detection of multi-scale spatial data and data matching. Existing methods mainly focus on the relationship similarity measurement of spatial data with identical or similar resolutions and areless concerned with the consistency of spatial relationship for collapse operation. In addition

the common concept-distance-based evaluation method cannot effectively achieve multi-scale representation. Hence

a generalized consistency assessment method for a mult-iscale spatial relationship that considers collapse operation is proposed. The concept of homonymous entity and its characteristics are introduced and discussed within the scope of multi-scale spatial representation. By considering the influences of the collapse operation in generalization

three generalized consistency assessment methods are proposed based on topological relation

cardinal direction relation

and distance relation. Then

a graph representing the adjacent relation of homonymous entities is adopted to implement and visualize the similarity calculation. To reduce the cost of calculation

the graph is simplified and extracted as subgraphs of spatial relationship. Finally

the consistency of multi-scale spatial representation can be judged according to the spatial relationship similarities based on the obtained relation graphs. The 1:10 000 geographical foundation data and the 1:50 000 derived data of a common area are used in the case study. Experimental results show that

compared with the concept-distance-based method

the proposed generalized consistency assessment method is more effective and has a wider application scope. This consistency assessment method can be effectively used in map generalization

multi-scale spatial database building

and spatial scene matching. Our subsequent work shall focus on establishing a systematic consistency assessment method from the perspectives of individual form

overall gestalt principle

and spatial semantics.