A Qualitative Theory of Motion Based on Spatio-Temporal Primitives.

It is shown what kind of properties usually assumed as desirable parts of any space-time theory are recovered from the authors' model, thus giving a sound theoretical basis for a natural, qualitative representation of motion.

Abstract

This paper presents a formal theory for reasoning about motion of spatial entities, in a qualitative framework. Taking over a theory intended for spatial entities, we enrich it to achieve a theory whose intended models are spatio-temporal entities, an idea sometimes proposed by philosophers or AI authors but never fully exploited. We show what kind of properties usually assumed as desirable parts of any space-time theory are recovered from our model, thus giving a sound theoretical basis for a natural, qualitative representation of motion. 1 INTRODUCTION This paper presents a theory for representing and reasoning about motion in a qualitative framework. A lot of work has been devoted to the representation of space in the past few years, as spatial concepts pervades many domains of AI. Part of these works have focused on the building of theories for reasoning about incomplete and/or imprecise information as such theories would be more easily exploited than the traditional quantitative ...