Efficient Imprecision–Imprecise Efficiency?

Foundations and Applications of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (FASTR)

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

In this paper, we try to shed some light on the relationship between imprecision in spatial reasoning systems and its impact on the complexity of the reasoning algorithms. Intuitively, reasoning about spatial descriptions should be easier if less precision is required. However, we claim that in general the introduction of imprecision does not improve the efficiency of the algorithms but rather deteriorates their performance. We back up this claim by two examples: one based on Allen relations and the other one based on operations used in geographic information systems.