The MERCATOR representation of spatial knowledge
Ernest Davis · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 1983
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. Objects 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 compared to other AI representations of shape and position.