Using a Geographic Information System for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning about Trafficability
James Donlon, Kenneth D. Forbus · 1999
Modern geographic information systems (GIS) are powerful quantitative tools for geospatial reasoning. We show how a GIS can be used as a metric diagram to support qualitative spatial reasoning. We illustrate the technique with the problem of reasoning about trafficability -- an entity's capability for movement through some terrain. Many common geospatial reasoning tasks rely heavily upon estimates of trafficability, and in some domains, off-road trafficability is of primary concern. Maps rarely provide the appropriate representation of space for such problems. We show how GIS technology can be used as a metric diagram from which place vocabularies appropriate to the task can be computed. We describe the domain theories that enable the computing of these place vocabularies, and provide models for qualitative trafficability reasoning based on these descriptions. The results suggest that the power of qualitative representations and reasoning can be brought to a variety of...