An Ontological Hierarchy for Spatial Knowledge

Contents

Knowledge in a complex domain may be organized into an ontological hierarchy, in which each level provides a different description of the world and a different set of feasible inferences. We discuss such a hierarchy for knowledge of large-scale space: the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy (SSH). We have used the SSH as the basis for our research on cognitive maps and robot exploration for many years. We illustrate by example how this knowledge-level hierarchy suggests a focused and productive set of research problems.