Qualitative Spatial Reasoning with Topological Information

Jochen Renz (eds.)3540433465, 9783540433460

Spatial knowledge representation and reasoning with spatial knowledge are relevant issues for many application areas such as robotics, geographical information systems, and computer vision. Exceeding purely quantitative approaches, more recently initiated qualitative approaches allow for dealing with spatial information on a more abstract level that is closer to the way humans think and speak.
Starting out with the qualitative, topological constraint calculus RCC8 proposed by Randell, Cui, and Cohn, this work presents answers to a variety of open questions regarding RCC8. The open issues concerning computational properties are solved by exploiting a broad variety of results and methods from logic and theoretical computer science. Questions concerning practical performance are addressed by large-scale empirical computational experiments. The most impressive result is probably the complete classification of computational properties for all fragments of RCC8.

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Table of contents :
Introduction….Pages 1-11
Background….Pages 13-29
Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning….Pages 31-40
The Region Connection Calculus….Pages 41-50
Cognitive Properties of Topological Spatial Relations….Pages 51-64
Computational Properties of RCC-8….Pages 65-116
A Complete Analysis of Tractability in RCC-8….Pages 117-130
Empirical Evaluation of Reasoning with RCC-8….Pages 131-154
Representational Properties of RCC-8….Pages 155-172
Conclusions….Pages 173-177
A. Enumeration of the Relations of the Maximal Tractable Subsets of RCC-8….Pages 179-190