Qualitative Spatial Reasoning for Applications: New Challenges and the SparQ Toolbox

About two decades ago, the field of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning (QSTR) emerged as a new area of AI research that set out to grasp human-level understanding and reasoning about spatial and temporal entities, linking formal approaches to cognitive theories. Empowering artificial agents with QSTR capabilities is claimed to facilitate manifold applications, including robot navigation, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), natural language understanding, and computer-aided design. QSTR is an active field of research that has developed many representation and reasoning approaches so far, but only comparatively few applications exist that actually build on these QSTR techniques. This chapter approaches QSTR from an application perspective. Considering the exemplary application domains of robot navigation, GIS, and computer-aided design, the authors conclude that reasoning must be interpreted in a broader sense than the often-considered constraint-based reasoning and that supporting tools must become available. The authors then discuss the newly identified reasoning tasks and how they can be supported by QSTR toolboxes to foster the dissemination of QSTR in applications. Furthermore, the authors explain how they aim to overcome the lack-of-tools dilemma through the development of the QSTR toolbox SparQ. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61692-868-1.ch011