Qualitative Spatial Reasoning about Line Segments

Abstract. Representing and reasoning about orientation information is an important aspect of qualitative spatial reasoning. We present a novel approach for dealing with intrinsic orientation information by specifying qualitative relations between oriented line segments, the simplest possible spatial entities being extended and having an intrinsic direction. We identify a set of 24 atomic relations which form a relation algebra and for which we compute relational compositions based on their algebraic semantics. Reasoning over the full algebra turns out to be NP-hard. Potential applications of the calculus are motivated with a small example which shows the reasoning capabilities of the dipole calculus using constraint-based reasoning methods.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ECAI
• Authors: Reinhard Moratz, Jochen Renz, Diedrich Wolter
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2000, Orientation Information, Qualitative Spatial Reasoning, Reasoning