Qualitative Spatial Interpretation of Course-of-Action Diagrams

This paper demonstrates qualitative spatial reasoning techniques in a real-world diagrammatic reasoning task: Course-of-Action (COA) diagrams. COA diagrams are military planning diagrams that depict unit movements and tasks in a given region. COA diagrams are a useful test bed for researching diagram understanding due to their composable symbology, their intrinsically spatial task, and their use across many types of military planning. We constructed two COA diagram interpreters using our qualitative spatial reasoning engine, GeoRep. The first system uses GeoRep to interpret individual COA glyphs. The second system, building upon the first, takes preclassified symbol input and then uses GeoRep to describe geographic relationships implied by the symbol arrangements. This latter system, in a recent DARPA initiative, answered dozens of geographic queries about many different COA diagrams. This research shows that qualitative spatial reasoning, through tools like GeoRep, provides a useful ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Ronald W. Ferguson, Robert A. Rasch Jr., William Turmel, Kenneth D. Forbus
• Keywords: AAAI 2000, Coa Diagrams, Diagrammatic Reasoning, Intelligent Agents, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning