Maintaining Spatial Relations in an Incremental Diagrammatic Reasoner

Because diagrams are often created incrementally, a qualitative diagrammatic reasoning system must dynamically manage a potentially large set of spatial interpretations. This paper describes an architecture for handling spatial relations in an incremental, nonmonotonic diagrammatic reasoning system. The architecture represents jointly exhaustive and pairwise disjoint (JEPD) spatial relation sets as nodes in a dependency network. Examples of these spatial relation sets are interval relations, relative orientation relations, and connectivity relations. The network caches dependencies between low-level spatial relations, allowing those relations to be easily assumed or retracted as visual elements are added or removed from a diagram. We also describe how the system supports high-level reasoning, including support for creating default assumptions. Finally, we show how this system was integrated with an existing drawing program and discuss its possible use in diagrammatic and geographic re...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: COSIT
• Authors: Ronald W. Ferguson, Joseph L. Bokor, Rudolph L. Mappus IV, Adam Feldman
• Keywords: COSIT 2003, Diagrammatic Reasoning, Spatial Relation Sets, Spatial Relations