Logics for Spatial Reasoning

Over the last decade temporal logics been extensively and successfully used as formal tools both in AI and software engineering but logics describing space have not been developed and exploited to the same degree, although we believe they are at least as important. Reasoning about space requires the explicit representation of topological, metrical and geometrical information. In contrast to our work, most Qualitative Reasoning research about space has concentrated upon geometrical information, e.g. for reasoning about kinematics, with less emphasis on topological and metrical information and has not been grounded in a logic.