Enhancing Spatial Reasoning by the Concept of Motion

Abstract

We present an approach to qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning which is based on directional orientation information as available through perception processes or natural language descriptions. Qualitative orientations in 2dimensional space are given by the relation between a point and a vector. In addition, the possible sequences of elementary movements are taken into consideration. The paper presents our basic iconic notation for spatial orientation relations. This notation makes use of the spatial structure of the domain. Using this notation, we explore a method for exploiting interactions between space and movement in this space for enhancing the inferential power.