to include the new fact. The goal of error correction is, given a spatial knowledge representation which is not quite accurate and a new fact which is more precise, to improve the representation. Both these problems can be treated by operators, similar to the composition operator, that take two symbolic spatial indexes as arguments (i.e., one representing the initial state and one representing ...

Qualitative spatial reasoning is often considered to be akin to human reasoning. This, however, is mostly based on the intuition of researchers rather than on empirical data. In this paper we continue our eeort in empirically studying the cognitive adequacy of systems of topo-logical relations. As compared to our previous empirical investigation KRR97], we partially lifted constraints on the sh...

If robots are to assume their long anticipated place by humanity’s side and help us in our unstructured environments, we believe that adopting human-like cognitive patterns will be valuable. These environments are the products of human preferences, activity and thought; they are imbued with semantic meaning. In this paper we investigate qualitative spatial relations with the aim of both perceiv...

This work presents a conceptual framework for representing, manipulating, measuring, and communicating in natural language several ideas about topological (non-metric) spatial locations, object spatial contexts, and user expectations of spatial relationships. It articulates a theory of spatial relations, how they can be represented as fuzzy predicates internally, and how they can be appropriate...

The formalization of the “part – of” relationship goes back to the mereology of S. Leśniewski, subsequently taken up by Leonard & Goodman (1940), and Clarke (1981). In this paper we investigate relation algebras obtained from different notions of “part–of”, respectively, “connectedness” in various domains. We obtain minimal models for the relational part of mereology in a general setting, and w...

Recent studies on the planning problem Rush-Hour showed that certain spatial properties among the game’s elements affect human planning and bias it towards a suboptimal solution. A cognitive model that solves Rush-Hour problems has been implemented with the goal of better understanding this effect. The ACT-R framework has been chosen as the foundation for this experiment. The model has been eva...

The quantitative (or fuzzy qualitative) assessment of directional spatial relationships (such as “to the right of”, “above”, “south of”...) between two areal objects often relies on the computation of a histogram of angles, which provides a representation of the relative position of the objects. In a recent paper, the notion of the histogram of forces was introduced. Here, we show that this pow...

Communication problems between humans and machines are often the reason for failures or wrong computations. While machines use well-defined languages and rules in formal models to compute information, humans prefer natural language expressions with only vaguely specified semantics. Similarity comparisons are a central construct of the human way of thinking. For instance, humans are able to act ...

Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as 'in' and 'on' in English by spatial prepositions and 'kkita' and 'nohta' in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight con...

Measuring semantic similarity among concepts is the core method for assessing the degree of semantic interoperability within and between ontologies. In this paper, we propose to extend current semantic similarity measures by accounting for the spatial relations between different geospatial concepts. Such integration of spatial relations, in particular topologic and metric relations, leads to an...