Qualitative spatial reasoning with directional and topological relations

Abstract

A wide range of application domains from cognitive robotics to intelligent systems encompassing diverse paradigms such as ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing environments require the ability to represent and reason about the spatial aspects of the environment within which an agent or a system is functional. Many existing spatial reasoners share a common limitation that they do not provide any checking functions for cross-consistency between the directional and the topological relation set. They provide only the checking function for path-consistency within a directional or topological relation set. This paper presents an efficient spatial reasoning algorithm working on a mixture of directional and topological relations between spatial entities and then explains the implementation of a spatial reasoner based on the proposed algorithm. Our algorithm not only has the checking function for path-consistency within each directional or topological relation set, but also provides the checking function for cross-consistency between them. This paper also presents an application system developed to demonstrate the applicability of the spatial reasoner and then introduces the results of the experiment carried out to evaluate the performance of our spatial reasoner.