Qualitative spatiotemporal representation and reasoning: a computational perspective
Frank Wolter, Michael Zakharyaschev · 2003
this paper argues for the rich world of representation that lies between these two extremes." (Levesque and Brachman 1985) 1 Introduction Time and space belong to those few fundamental concepts that always puzzled scholars from almost all scientic disciplines, gave endless themes to science ction writers, and were of vital concern to our everyday life and commonsense reasoning. So whatever approach to AI one takes (Russell and Norvig 1995), temporal and spatial representation and reasoning will always be among its most important ingredients; cf. (Hayes 1985). Knowledge representation (KR) has been quite successful in dealing separately with both time and space. The spectrum of formalisms in use ranges from temporal and spatial databases, in which data are indexed by temporal and/or spatial parameters (see e.g. (Srek 1995; Worboys 1995)), to numerical methods developed in computational geometry (see e.g. (Preparata and Shamos 1985)) and various qual