Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning

Description

Cover; Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Introduction. Qualitative Reasoning; Chapter 1. Allen's Calculus; 1.1. Introduction; 1.1.1. ""The mystery of the dark room""; 1.1.2. Contributions of Allen's formalism; 1.2. Allen's interval relations; 1.2.1. Basic relations; 1.2.2. Disjunctive relations; 1.3. Constraint networks; 1.3.1. Definition; 1.3.2. Expressiveness; 1.3.3. Consistency; 1.4. Constraint propagation; 1.4.1. Operations: inversion and composition; 1.4.2. Composition table; 1.4.3. Allen's algebra; 1.4.4. Algebraic closure.;Starting with an updated description of Allen's calculus, the book proceeds with a description of the main qualitative calculi which have been developed over the last two decades. It describes the connection of complexity issues to geometric properties. Models of the formalisms are described using the algebraic notion of weak representations of the associated algebras. The book also includes a presentation of fuzzy extensions of qualitative calculi, and a description of the study of complexity in terms of clones of operations.