Qualitative representation and reasoning with uncertainty in space and time

Abstract

Imprecision, indeterminacy and vagueness are all terms which have been studied recently in studies of representations of entities in space and time. The interest has arisen from the fact that in many cases, precise information about objects in space are not available. In this paper a study of spatial uncertainty is presented and extended to temporal uncertainty. Different types and modes of uncertainty are identified. A unified framework is presented for the representation and reasoning over uncertain qualitative domains. The method addresses some of the main limitations of the current approaches. It is shown to apply to different types of entities with arbitrary complexity with total or partial uncertainty. The approach is part of a comprehensive research program aimed at developing a unified complete theory for qualitative spatial and temporal domains. © 2006 Springer-Verlag London.