Full papers due: February 28, 1997
Reviewed by: July, 1997
Revised papers due: December 1, 1997=20
Tentative publication date: May 1998
The qualitative approach to the representation of spatial knowledge has gained considerable popularity in recent years. Qualitative representations are characterized by making only as many distinctions in the domain of discourse as necessary in a given context. Previous work in this area has concentrated on models for topology and orientation, with some recent advances in qualitative representations for distance, shape, and motion. Problems that have been dealt with are, e.g., spatial inference, consistency checking, similarity retrieval and iconic indexing. Contributions have come from areas as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Geography, Linguistics and Mathematics. The models developed have potential applications in many areas including Geographic Information Systems, Vehicle and Robot Navigation Systems, Computer Aided Design, Human Computer Interaction (Interface Design), Queries to Large Spatial Databases, Image Information Retrieval as well as Sensor Data Fusion.
A special issue of the International Journal of Visual Languages and Computing will be devoted to this new subject. Papers should address research questions and case studies in the area, including but not limited to the following topics:
Ontologies of time and space, Aspects of space (distance, orientation, topology, shape, etc.), Spatio-temporal aspects (change, motion), Cognitive aspects, (Languages of) Spatial relations, Applications (GIS, Navigation, Design, HCI, etc), Uncertainty and granularity in spatial representations, Relation to visual languages, Relation to diagrammatical reasoning, Natural language spatial expressions, Image Information Retrieval (including, e.g., iconic indexing and similarity retrieval), Contributions to Qualitative Spatial Reasoning that involve time as well are also of interest and importance. Paper preparation guidelines can be found in any issue of the journal. For more information, please contact the guest editors:
Dr. Daniel Hernandez
Fakultaet fuer Informatik
Technische Universitaet Muenchen
80290 Munich, Germany
Email: danher@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
Phone: +49 89 289 22606
Fax: +49 89 289 28483
or
Dr. Erland Jungert
FOA
Box 1165
S-581 11 Linkoping
Email : jungert@lin.foa.se
Phone: +46 13 31 83 37
Fax: +46 13 31 80 58