Towards a Generalized Spatio-Temporal Understanding for the Semantic Web

Foundations and Applications of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (FASTR)

Volume

Papers from the 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

While there have been decades of research on spatio-temporal reasoning (STR) logics, the obstacle preventing a complete understanding of our world is the lack of spatio-temporal structures in existing ontologies. This is particularly true for semantic web efforts: for how do we begin to create a semantic web when we cannot define the semantics of the entities with which we which we wish to populate this web? In this paper we will outline some of the particular issues involved, focusing in particular on spatio-temporal knowledge representation. We begin with a discussion of various application requirements, provide a fundamental overview of ontological and spatio-temporal theories, and propose a more general approach for representing and reasoning spatio-temporal relations.