This paper presents a method for reasoning about spatial objects and their qualitative spatial relationships. In contrast to existing work, which mainly focusses on reasoning about qualitative spatial relations alone, we integrate quantitative and qualitative information with terminological reasoning. For spatioterminological reasoning we present the description logic ALCRP(D) and define an app...

LEWIS (1988) made the case that today’s biology is essentially hypothetico-deductive in nature. In Lewis’s view, biology is not a science in which one gathers all the facts, classifies them and then somehow crystallizes them into theory. In Lewis’s words, ‘‘This erroneous view of method plus the absence of a proper definition of theory misguided my early development in science’’ (p. 362). The f...

The paper presents a method for terminological reasoning about spatial objects on the basis of a KL-ONE-like framework (LOOM). We apply this method to the domain of deductive geographic information systems and parsing of visual languages. In contrast to existing work, which mainly focusseson reasoning about qualitative spatial relations, we integrate quantitative information with conceptual or ...

Science and mathematics seem to be huge success stories. Hence it is not surprising that most scientists and mathematicians think that science and mathematics are the most secure ways of acquiring knowledge, and that all knowledge could, at least in principle, be derived using either the scientific method, using inductive reasoning, and in the case of mathematical knowledge, using deductive rea...

Representing knowledge as high-dimensional vectors in a continuous semantic vector space can help overcome the brittleness and incompleteness of traditional knowledge bases. We present a method for performing deductive reasoning directly in such a vector space, combining analogy, association, and deduction in a straightforward way at each step in a chain of reasoning, drawing on knowledge from ...