Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning: Current Status and Future Challenges

Abstract

Qualitative Spatial & Temporal Reasoning (QSTR) is a major field of study in Symbolic AI that deals with the representation and reasoning of spatio-temporal information in an abstract, human-like manner. We survey the current status of QSTR from a viewpoint of reasoning approaches, and identify certain future challenges that we think that, once overcome, will allow the field to meet the demands of and adapt to real-world, dynamic, and time-critical applications of highly active areas such as machine learning and data mining.