. The field of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning is now an active research area in its own right within AI (and also in Geographical Information Systems) having grown out of earlier work in philosophical logic and more general Qualitative Reasoning in AI. In this paper (which is an updated version of [25]) I will survey the state of the art in Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, covering representation and reasoning issues as well as pointing to some application areas. 1 What is Qualitative Reasoning? The principal goal of Qualitative Reasoning (QR) [129] is to represent not only our everyday commonsense knowledge about the physical world, but also the underlying abstractions used by engineers and scientists when they create quantitative models. Endowed with such knowledge, and appropriate reasoning methods, a computer could make predictions, diagnoses and explain the behaviour of physical systems in a qualitative manner, even when a precise quantitative description is not available 1 ...

. Although Qualitative Reasoning has been a lively subfield of AI for many years now, it is only comparatively recently that substantial work has been done on qualitative spatial reasoning; this paper lays out a guide to the issues involved and surveys what has been achieved. The papers is generally informal and discursive, providing pointers to the literature where full technical details may be found. 1 What is Qualitative Reasoning? The principal goal of Qualitative Reasoning (QR) [86] is to represent not only our everyday commonsense knowledge about the physical world, but also the underlying abstractions used by engineers and scientists when they create quantitative models. Endowed with such knowledge, and appropriate reasoning methods, a computer could make predictions, diagnoses and explain the behaviour of physical systems in a qualitative manner, even when a precise quantitative description is not available 1 or is computationally intractable. The key to a qualitative ...

INTRODUCTION This is a brief overview of formal theories concerned with the study of the notions of (and the relations between) parts and wholes. The guiding idea is that we can distinguish between a theory of parthood (mereology) and a theory of wholeness (holology, which is essentially afforded by topology), and the main question examined is how these two theories can be combined to obtain a unified theory of parts and wholes. We examine various non-equivalent ways of pursuing this task, mainly with reference to its relevance to spatio-temporal reasoning. In particular, three main strategies are compared: (i) mereology and topology as two independent (though mutually related) theories; (ii) mereology as a general theory subsuming topology; (iii) topology as a general theory subsuming mereology. This is done in Sections 4 through 6. We also consider some more speculative strategies and directions for further research. First, however, we begin with some preliminary outline of

The Region-Connection Calculus (RCC) is a well established formal system for qualitative spatial reasoning. It provides an axiomatization of space which takes regions as primitive, rather than as constructions from sets of points. The paper introduces boolean connection algebras (BCAs), and proves that these structures are equivalent to models of the RCC axioms. BCAs permit a wealth of results from the theory of lattices and boolean algebras to be applied to RCC. This is demonstrated by two theorems which provide constructions for BCAs from suitable distributive lattices. It is already well known that regular connected topological spaces yield models of RCC, but the theorems in this paper substantially generalize this result. Additionally, the lattice theoretic techniques used provide the first proof of this result which does not depend on the existence of points in regions. Keywords: Region-Connection Calculus, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, Boolean Connection Algebra, Mer...

The formalization of the “part – of ” relationship goes back to the mereology of S. Le´sniewski, subsequently taken up by Leonard & Goodman (1940), and Clarke (1981). In this paper we investigate relation algebras obtained from different notions of “part–of”, respectively, “connectedness” in various domains. We obtain minimal models for the relational part of mereology in a general setting, and when the underlying set is an atomless Boolean algebra. 1

We prove a representation theorem for Boolean contact algebras which implies that the axioms for the Region Connection Calculus [20] (RCC) are complete for the class of subalgebras of the algebras of regular closed sets of weakly regular connected T 1 spaces.

This thesis investigates logical representations for describing and reasoning about spatial situations. Previously proposed theories of spatial regions are investigated in some detail --- especially the 1st-order theory of Randell, Cui and Cohn (1992). The difficulty of achieving effective automated reasoning with these systems is observed. A new approach is presented, based on encoding spatial relations in formulae of 0-order (`propositional ') logics. It is proved that entailment, which is valid according to the standard semantics for these logics, is also valid with respect to the spatial interpretation. Consequently, well-known mechanisms for propositional reasoning can be applied to spatial reasoning. Specific encodings of topological relations into both the modal logic S4 and the intuitionistic propositional calculus are given. The complexity of reasoning using the intuitionistic representation is examined and a procedure is presented which is shown to be of O(n 3 ) complexity ...

The need for spatial representations and spatial reasoning is ubiquitous in AI – from robot planning and navigation, to interpreting visual inputs, to understanding natural language – in all these cases the need to represent and reason about spatial aspects of the world is of key importance. Related fields of research, such as geographic information science

We explore the relation--algebraic aspects of the region connection calculus (RCC) of Randell et al. (1992a). In particular, we present a refinement of the RCC8 table which shows that the axioms provide for more relations than are listed in the present table. We also show that each RCC model leads to a Boolean algebra. Finally, we prove that a refined version of the RCC5 table has as models all atomless Boolean algebras B with the natural ordering as the "part -- of" relation, and that the table is closed under first order definable relations iff B is homogeneous. 1 Introduction Qualitative reasoning (QR) has its origins in the exploration of properties of physical systems when numerical information is not sufficient -- or not present -- to explain the situation at hand (Weld and Kleer, 1990). Furthermore, it is a tool to represent the abstractions of researchers who are constructing numerical systems which model the physical world. Thus, it fills a gap in data modeling which often l...

This paper is a continuation of [41]. The notion of local connection algebra, based on the primitive notions of connection and boundedness, is introduced. It is slightly different but equivalent to...