Qualitative Spatial Reasoning
Tony Cohn
Course Description
While the field of Qualitative Reasoning is now well established it is
only recently that there has been substantial investigation of calculi
suitable for representing and reasoning about space in a qualitative
way. This tutorial will survey the state of the art in qualitative
spatial representation and reasoning techniques, including mechanisms
for reasoning about spatial change. We will look at how these ideas may
be applied in a wide variety of domains, from robotics and high level
vision to the semantics of natural language expressions and of visual
programming languages though to Geographical Information Systems. The
tutorial will conclude with a look at open research issues.
The aim of the tutorial is to present the state of art in Qualitative
Spatial Reasoning to the non specialist; this could either provide a
suitable introduction for the intending research student, or for a
practitioner in another research area or application domain who may be
interested in exploiting QSR techniques. The presentation is expected to
include practical demonstrations of techniques and applications
including video footage. There will be ample opportunity for tutees to
ask questions.
After an introduction covering basic ontology, some history and
motivation, the tutorial syllabus will cover major aspects of
qualitative spatial representation (including topology, distance and
size, orientation and shape), uncertainty and vagueness, spatial change,
reasoning techniques, applications and research issues.
Some basic knowledge of logic would be helpful but not essential for
understanding the tutorial.
About the Lecturers
Tony Cohn
is Professor of Automated Reasoning at the University of Leeds and has
been leading a research group on qualitative spatial reasoning since the
late 1980s. He coordinates the European network SPACENET on qualitative
spatial reasoning and has given a number of invited tutorials and
lectures on the subject in various international AI and Geographical
Information Systems forums. He has been chairman of the European and
British AI societies and programme chair of several AI conferences.
higuchi@etl.go.jp
Last modified: Thu Feb 20 13:14:03 JST 1997