---
title: "The Mercator Representation of Spatial Knowledge"
authors:
  - "Ernest Davis"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/70"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1983/0070.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1983
pages: "295-300"
track: "Knowledge Representation"
keywords:
---

# The Mercator Representation of Spatial Knowledge

Ernest Davis

*Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 295-300.

## Abstract

The MERCATOR program constructs a cognitive map from a sequence of scene descriptions. A new representation of two-dimensional geography was developed for this program. 0bjects are represented by sets of polygons; their boundaries, by sets of directed edges. The relative positions of objects are determined by connecting edges. A truth conditional semantics for this representation is presented, its strengths and weaknesses are evaluated, and it is com pared to other AI representations of shape and position.