Proposal to participate at NCGIA I21,
Formal Models of Common-Sense Geographic Worlds

A position statement or research abstract, describing a particular element of or perspective on the topic.

Anthony Cohn

Qualitative spatial reasoning is a field which has defined itself over the last few years as researchers in a variety of subject areas have recognised the extent to which they have interests in common. These fields include Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Robotics, Machine Vision, Linguistics and Qualitative Reasoning about Physical Processes. In all these areas, sophisticated automated reasoning about the spatial relations between physical objects or regions of space is of fundamental importance; and in many cases, this must be done without precise, quantitative information about these relations.

My particular interest has been the development of expressive logics for representing knowledge about qualitative relationships between spatial regions and their shape; furthermore my group has investigated techniques (such as composition tables and decidable logics), for reasoning with this knowledge. Reasoning in the presence of uncertain knowledge is a fundamental problem to both the AI and GIS communities and I have been addressing this problem in the context of representing and reasoning about spatial entities with uncertain boundaries. My interest has not just been in static snapshots of spatial situations, but also in the important issue of reasoning about spatial processes which endure over time.

A recent 1200 word position statement of mine on qualitative spatial reasoning can be found here:

The Challenge of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, A G Cohn
Computing Surveys, Vol 27(3), pp 323-327, 1995.

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