Qualitative Spatial Descriptions of Change using Granularity

Speaker: John Stell, School of Computing, Leeds University

Abstract: Commonsense spatial concepts include: near to, inside, next to, touching, overlapping, crossing, etc., and are widely used in situations such as giving verbal directions or informal descriptions of natural or manufactured objects or places. These descriptions appear very natural, but manipulating them in systems for geographical information or other kinds of spatial information can be much more challenging than handling geometrical data in terms of numerical coordinates. The field of qualitative spatial reasoning includes work on the logical properties of spatial concepts and it interacts with many disciplines (philosophy, mathematics, psychology, linguistics etc) in order to represent spatial concepts and to understand ways of processing them. In this talk I will give a general overview of qualitative spatial representations.I will go on to give a non-technical survey of recent work dealing with qualitative descriptions of spatial change (imagine crowds of people observed merging and splitting over a period of time). I will show how combining qualitative descriptions at different levels of detail provides more expressive descriptions than can be obtained from a single level of detail.

Biographical Note: John Stell is a senior lecturer in the School of Computing, University of Leeds, where he has been since 2001.He leads the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning research group and his own research deals with the mathematical and logical aspects of qualitative spatial reasoning.His background includes degrees in mathematics, computer science, and fine art; the combination of these topics has led to a number of interdisciplinary projects and motivates a distinctly visual and diagrammatic approach to his presentations.