Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning

Abstract

In this chapter we give an overview of the field of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. Since a lot of research on that topic has been done, this overview cannot be complete. Instead, we try to give an insight into the lines of research which originated and inspired our work. Some more complete overview articles are by Cohn [27,26] and Vieu [159]. Although qualitative spatial representation and qualitative spatial reasoning can be regarded as two separate sub-fields (where the former deals with the different forms of spatial knowledge and how this can be formalized and represented in a computational framework, while the latter deals with methods and techniques for reasoning about spatial knowledge and developing efficient algorithms) we will in the following subsume both sub-fields by the term qualitative spatial reasoning or QSR for short. On the one hand this is for reasons of brevity, on the other hand because reasoning about spatial knowledge is certainly not possible without representing it.