Diagrammatical Aspects of Qualitative Representation of Space

Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations

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Reasoning with Diagrammatic Representations

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In this paper we demonstrate the usefulness of the diagrammatical aspects of a qualitative representation of positions in 2-D space [6]. Qualitative representations make only as many distinctions as necessary to identify objects, events, situations, etc. in a given context (identification task) as opposed to those needed to fully reconstruct a situation (reconstruction task). While the distinctions made are expressed propositionally in form of relations, we use data structures that analogically reflect the structure of the relational domain on a higher level of abstraction. This representation allows to perform operations such as a change in point of view or the composition of relations efficiently.