SBox: A Qualitative Spatial Reasoner –Progress Report–

This paper presents a method for reasoning about spatial objects and their qualitative spatial relationships (e.g. touches, overlaps etc.) on the basis of a description logic framework. We apply this method to the domain of deductive geographic information systems. In contrast to existing work, which mainly focuses on reasoning about qualitative spatial relations alone, we integrate quantitative and qualitative information with terminological reasoning by extending description logics with a space box reasoner which is inspired by an extension to description logics called “concrete domains.” With the space box reasoner presented in this paper it is possible to combine qualitative spatial reasoning and description logic classification processes. Keywords— Qualitative spatial reasoning, description logics, deductive geographical information systems.