Querying Indefinite Spatial and Temporal Information: The New Frontier

M. Koubarakis and S. Skiadopoulos
In Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Hot Topics in Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, August 1999.

Abstract:
Temporal and spatial constraint networks do not live alone in the wilderness. In many cases they are components of larger systems e.g., temporal database systems, spatial database systems, knowledge representation systems, natural language systems, planning systems, scheduling systems, multimedia systems and so on. We believe that an interesting new frontier for temporal and spatial reasoning research is the formalisation, analysis and possible re-implementation of systems where temporal or spatial reasoners are an important component. In this paper we will make a first contribution to this exciting area of research. We will consider temporal constraint networks complemented by a database for storing the information typically used to label network nodes. We will then study the computational complexity of querying the combined system using a first order modal query language.

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