---
title: "Toward a Geometry of Common Sense: A Semantics and a Complete Axiomatization of Mereotopology"
authors:
  - "Nicholas Asher"
  - "Laure Vieu"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/110"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1995/0110.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1995
pages: "846-851"
track: "Knowledge Representation"
keywords:
---

# Toward a Geometry of Common Sense: A Semantics and a Complete Axiomatization of Mereotopology

Nicholas Asher, Laure Vieu

*Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 846-851.

## Abstract

Mereological and topological notions of connection, part, interior and complement are central to spatial reasoning and to the semantics of natural language expressions concerning locations and relative positions. While several authors have proposed axioms for these notions, no one with the exception ofTarski [18], who based his axiomatization of mereological notions on a Euclidean metric, has attempted to give them a semantics. We offer an alternative to Tarski, starting with mereotopological notions that have proved useful in the semantic analysis of spatial expressions. We also give a complete axiomatization of this account of mereotopological reasoning.