Default Reasoning And The Qualitative Representation Of Spatial Knowledge

Qualitative Representation of Spatial Knowledge

This book develops, for the first time, a qualitative model for the representation of spatial knowledge based only on locative relations between the objects involved. The core of this book is devoted to the study of qualitative inference methods that take into account the rich structure of space. These methods can be applied to quite a number of areas characterized by uncertain or incomplete knowledge, as for example geographic information systems, robot control, computer-aided architectural design, and natural language information systems.

Default reasoning and the qualitative representation of spatial knowledge

Qualitative Spatial Reasoning

With the aim of automatically reasoning with spatial aspects in a cognitive way, several qualitative models have been developed recently in the Qualitative Spatial Reasoning field. However, there is no model to reason with several spatial aspects in a uniform way. Moreover, most of these models simplify spatial objects to points. In this book we present a novel approach for integrating the qualitative concepts of orientation, distance, and cardinal directions, using points as well as extended objects as primitive of reasoning, based on Constraint Logic Programming. The resulting model has been applied to build a qualitative Navigation Simulator on the structured environment of the city of Castellon.