Spatial and Temporal Information Retrieval in Textual Corpora - Geographical Information Retrieval in Textual Corpora - page 24

2.3.4. Reasoning
We are interested in the work relative to qualitative reasoning. This concerns
cognition, in other words the way to make knowledge explicit, from a common sense
point of view: for example, without using Euclidean geometry for the qualitative
reasoning relative to the spatial dimension. Its origin lies in the works of Allen
[ALL 84, ALL 91] on qualitative temporal reasoning. Allen proposes a first
classification of the relations between intervals of time [ALL 84, MUL 04]:
Figure 2.1 shows these different temporal relations.
Figure 2.1. Allen relations [ALL 84] - illustration taken from [MUL 04]
Proposals for qualitative spatial reasoning have adapted these pieces of work by
taking into account the specificities and the greater complexity of spatial information.
The region connection calculus 8 (RCC-8) [RAN 92] is the reference model: it
defines eight relations between x and y regions, such as partial overlapping or
equality (Figure 2.2 describes the different topological relations). There exist
numerousextensionstothesepiecesofwork: forexample, Egenhofer et al. [EGE 94]
propose taking into account linear representations and Szmurlo and Gaio [SZM 98]
propose a method for the construction of conceptual neighborhood graphs.
Cohn [COH 96] and Cohn and Hazarika [COH 01] offer a survey relative to
qualitative spatial reasoning and categorize, in particular, spatial relations. More
recently, Challita [CHA 05a] summarizes the general approach relative to spatial
reasoning in the two following steps:
- set the basic spatial entities;