Japan, the leading Asian economy and the second most powerful economy in the world, is currently recovering from a long and harrowing period of recession. In order to maintain the current positive momentum, and to have any chance of maintaining relativities with rapidly developing China and India, numerous commentators have suggested that fundamental changes to the Japanese business system are ...

The central component of commonsense reasoning about causdity is the envisionment: a description of the behavior of a phvsical system that is derived from its structural description by qualitative simulation. Two problems with creating the envisionmcnt are the qualitative representation of quentlty and the detection of previously-unsuspcctcd points ot qualitative change. The representation pres...

Comparative analysis answers questions about how and why a system will react to perturbations of its parameters. For example, comparative analysis can explain why the period of a spring/block system would increase if the mass of the block were larger. This paper formalizes the problem of comparative analysis and describes a solution technique, differential qualitative analysis; the technique on...

Humans’ representation in nature language about geographic phenomena is usually qualitative rather than quantitative. Qualitative spatial reasoning provides an approach which is considered to be closer to the representation. Commercial GIS software are confronted with a challenge that the software should be equipped with artificial intelligent functions like qualitative spatial reasoning for mo...

We present a qualitative shape description which has previously been proven to be useful for object categorisation. The description is based on a set of shape primitives which we will restrict to a new subset of relations representing stylised curvature information. In contrast to other qualitative shape theories, this description enables us to distinguish different convex shapes. This is espec...

This paper presents the new description logic ALCRA . ALCRA combines the well-known standard description logic ALC with compositionbased role axioms of the form S ◦T v R1t· · · tRn. We argue that these axioms are nearly indispensable components in a description logic framework suitable for qualitative spatial reasoning tasks. An ALCRA spatial reasoning example is presented, and the relationship...

This paper presents the new description logicALCRA⊖ . ALCRA⊖ combines the well-known standard description logic ALC with compositionbased role axioms of the form S ◦T ⊑ R1⊔· · · ⊔Rn. We argue that these axioms are nearly indispensable components in a description logic framework suitable for qualitative spatial reasoning tasks. An ALCRA⊖ spatial reasoning example is presented, and the relationsh...

This paper presents a qualitative shape description scheme which has been defined in order to have a formal theory to allow the construction of new shapes from a set of given shapes by using a juxtaposition operation. Specifically, the qualitative shape description scheme defined is a pragmatic scheme since it has been defined in order to be applied in the automatic and intelligent assembling o...

The extrema in a signal and its first few derivatives provide a useful general purpose qualitative description for many kinds of signals. A fundamental problem in computing such descriptions is scale: a derivative must be taken over some neighborhood, but there is seldom a principled basis for choosing its size. Scale-space filtering is a method that describes signals qualitatively, managing th...