Spatial Cognition: An AI Perspective

* Cognitive Systems Research Group and SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, Universität Bremen, Germany. Email: [email protected] Abstract. After a decade of temporal reasoning in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the 1980s and 1990s, spatial reasoning and spatial cognition have moved into the focus of interest in concentrated research enterprises since the mid 1990s. This paper describes the interdisciplinary research area of spatial cognition from an artificial intelligence perspective and motivates the interest in the field and the challenges from a cognitive perspective. It argues that all themes of cognitive science surface in spatial cognition and that spatial cognition is particularly suitable to investigate these themes. The particular significance of spatial structures for knowledge acquisition and knowledge processing by cognitive agents is described; it is shown why spatial structures are instrumental in making sense of physical environments and abstract worlds. Basic approaches to computationally process spatial knowledge are sketched out; the role of qualitative reasoning in AI is compared to the role of qualitative approaches in other disciplines. The relative merits of intrinsically spatial and of more abstract, non-spatial ways of dealing with spatial knowledge are discussed. The role of schematic representation of spatial knowledge is addressed.