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On the Scope of Qualitative Constraint Calculi

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KI 2014: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 2014)

Abstract

A central notion in qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning is the concept of qualitative constraint calculus, which captures a particular paradigm of representing and reasoning about spatial and temporal knowledge. The concept, informally used in the research community for a long time, was formally defined by Ligozat and Renz in 2004 as a special kind of relation algebra — thus emphasizing a particular type of reasoning about binary constraints. Although the concept is known to be limited it has prevailed in the community. In this paper we revisit the concept, contrast it with alternative approaches, and analyze general properties. Our results indicate that the concept of qualitative constraint calculus is both too narrow and too general: it disallows different approaches, but its setup already enables arbitrarily hard problems.

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Westphal, M., Hué, J., Wölfl, S. (2014). On the Scope of Qualitative Constraint Calculi. In: Lutz, C., Thielscher, M. (eds) KI 2014: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8736. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11206-0_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11206-0_20

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11205-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11206-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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