ECAI-2002 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Reasoning about spatio-temporal relations at different levels of granularity

Thomas Bittner

This paper discusses aspects of qualitative reasoning about approximate spatio-temporal location at multiple levels of granularity. We start by defining systems of granularities which are tree-like hierarchical structures which are used as frames of reference in order to specify approximate location of objects. We then define levels of granularities within those tree structures based on the notion of cuts proposed in [RS95]. Levels of granularity form a lattice structure. Following [SW98] we define the notion of stratified map spaces over such a granularity lattice. Stratified maps are descriptions of objects in a certain domain at different levels of granularity. The structure of stratified map spaces allows us to perform reasoning about location which is specified at different levels of granularity like: Assume that John is in the same place in which Mary is (e.g., in Hyde Park) and that Mary is also in the same place in which Paula is. It is then our aim to derive that John and Paula are in the same place, namely London. RS95 P. Rigaux and M. Scholl. Multi-scale partitions: Application to spatial and statistical databases. In M. Egenhofer and J. Herrings, editors, Advances in Spatial Databases (SSD'95), number 951 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995. SW98 J.G. Stell and M.F. Worboys. Stratified map spaces: A formal basis for multi-resolution spatial databases. In T. K. Poiker and N. Chrisman, editors, SDH'98 Proceedings 8th International Symposium on Spatial Data Handling, pages 180-189. International Geographical Union, 1998

Keywords: Spatial Reasoning, Temporal Reasoning, Qualitative Reasoning, Granularity

Citation: Thomas Bittner: Reasoning about spatio-temporal relations at different levels of granularity. In F. van Harmelen (ed.): ECAI2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2002, pp.317-321.