The Impact of Qualification on the Application of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Calculi

Ever since Allen introduced his qualitative interval algebra in 1983, the area of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning (QSTR) has been motivated by potential application areas that require humanoriented, commonsense reasoning. Despite this, it is well recognised in the community that there are relatively few commercial applications that heavily employ QSTR calculi. In this paper we directly address this issue by establishing a theoretical foundation for describing, developing and analysing QSTR based applications. We present an analysis of QSTR calculus qualification and investigate the impact that qualification has on a QSTR application’s reasoning properties such as completeness and soundness. Our definition of QSTR applications also provides software developers with a basic template to begin creating their own applications. Concrete examples of existing QSTR applications are used to demonstrate and motivate this research.