Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning
(Michael Witbrock, Cycorp) Many of our most basic thoughts involve temporal and spatial reasoning: putting something in the microwave; deciding to get out of bed tomorrow morning; assembling examples in a list. One way of reasoning about these sorts of things is to place everything at an exact set of coordinates in time and space, but this doesn’t often lead to efficient ways of combining reasoning about time an space with reasoning about the things that are in time and space. Using qualitative spatial and temporal relations is helpful, and is generally what people do: we talk about things being next to one another, or after one another. We use deliberately vague expressions like “somewhere in Slovenia” or “somewhat later”.Giving computers the ability to reason with these qualitative spatiotemporal relations has been a research areas for almost as long as giving computers the ability to reason has. And a great deal of progress has been made.I recently gave a talk on integrating this reasoning with more general, broad covering reasoning systems (like Cyc), and encouraged participants at the Symposium to wrap their algorithms as LarKC plugins. This is exactly the sort of community LarKC is intended to address: researchers who would like to apply their results more broadly, and evaluate them in realistic, integrated settings, but who don’t have the resources (or, really, the motivation) to spend the time to build a platform. Judging from the enthusiastic response, I think we’ll see some spatial and temporal reasoners as early plugins.
Tags: LarKC plugin; temporal reasoning; spatial reasoning; AA, Qualitative reasoning