Spatial and Temporal Reasoning

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xix

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2. Overview

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 3-3

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   2. Spatial Representation and Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence

      • Laure Vieu

      Pages 5-41

   3. Reasoning about Time and Actions in Artificial Intelligence: Major Issues

      • Alfonso Gerevini

      Pages 43-70

3. Spatial Representation and Reasoning

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 71-71

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   2. Spatial Entities

      • Roberto Casati, Achille C. Varzi

      Pages 73-96

   3. Representing and Reasoning with Qualitative Spatial Relations About Regions

      • Anthony G. Cohn, Brandon Bennett, John Gooday, Nicholas M. Gotts

      Pages 97-134

   4. Spatial Ontology: A Geographical Information Point of View

      • Andrew U. Frank

      Pages 135-153

   5. Language, Spatial Cognition, and Vision

      • Annette Herskovits

      Pages 155-202

4. Temporal Reasoning

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 203-203

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   2. Actions and Events in Interval Temporal Logic

      • James F. Allen, George Ferguson

      Pages 205-245

   3. Probabilistic Projection in Planning

      • Drew McDermott

      Pages 247-287

   4. Underlying Semantics for Action and Change with Ramification

      • Erik Sandewall

      Pages 289-318

5. Between Space and Time

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 319-319

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   2. Space, Time, and Movement

      • Antony Galton

      Pages 321-352

6. Back Matter

   Pages 353-394

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Qualitative reasoning about space and time - a reasoning at the human level - promises to become a fundamental aspect of future systems that will accompany us in daily activity.
The aim of Spatial and Temporal Reasoning is to give a picture of current research in this area focusing on both representational and computational issues. The picture emphasizes some major lines of development in this multifaceted, constantly growing area. The material in the book also shows some common ground and a novel combination of spatial and temporal aspects of qualitative reasoning.
Part I presents the overall scene. The chapter by Laure Vieu is on the state of the art in spatial representation and reasoning, and that by Alfonso Gerevini gives a similar survey on research in temporal reasoning. The specific contributions to these areas are then grouped in the two main parts. In Part II, Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi examine the ontological status of spatial entities; Anthony Cohn, Brandon Bennett, John Gooday, and Nicholas Gotts present a detailed theory of reasoning with qualitative relations about regions; Andrew Frank discusses the spatial needs of geographical information systems; and Annette Herskovits focuses on the linguistic expression of spatial relations. In Part III, James Allen and George Ferguson describe an interval temporal logic for the representation of actions and events; Drew McDermott presents an efficient way of predicting the outcome of plan execution; and Erik Sandewall introduces a semantics based on transitions for assessing theories of action and change. In Part IV, Antony Galton's chapter stands clearly between the two areas of space and time and outlines the main coordinates of an integrated approach.

• Index
• Tempora
• aspect
• future
• present
• semantics
• subject

• Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (IRST), Povo (Trento), Italy

  Oliviero Stock

Oliviero Stock is the Head of the Cognitive and Communication Technologies Division at the Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica (IRST) in Trento, Italy. His main research activities are artificial intelligence, natural language processing, intelligent interfaces and human-computer interaction. He has been the President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Chairman of the European coordinating committee for Artificial Intelligence.

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