Foundations and Applications of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (FASTR)
Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium
Hans W. Guesgen, Debasis Mitra, and Jochen Renz, Cochairs
Technical Report SS-03-03
83 pp., $30.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-180-1
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In the last few decades a tremendous progress has been made in the field of spatio-temporal knowledge management and reasoning with qualitative and incomplete information, primarily in inventing new domains of space and time and in studying complexity issues in reasoning over them. It has now attained a critical mass where a new investigation needs to be launched in order to understand the foundation of all these works. A lack of such fundamental understanding is behind the reason why the field has not found as much enthusiasm amongst the information technology practitioners as it should have had. Space and time being ubiquitous in information processing the expectation of having such applications is very high, but so far that remained somewhat elusive. Apparently the causes behind the situation are:
- Fundamental: no existing generalized understanding across different domains of space and time.
- Methodological: the lesser practicable algebraic approach primarily taken by the community so far as opposed to a geometrical one closer to the actual underlying space.
- Strategic: the lack of critical mass of application fields for each individual spatial or temporal domain.
All these three problems are linked with each other, i.e., they could be attacked at the same time. This symposium will try to formalize these three shortcomings of the community, set a direction in which the research should focus on in the spatio-temporal reasoning area, and galvanize the community into forming a long term vision and infrastructure for future works.
Researchers participating in the symposium will be asked to give some special thoughts in the generalizing aspects between different ontologies than just reporting the results from their theoretical works from any individual ontology. In order to address the third issue mentioned above we will also seek participation from practitioners who may benefit from the results in spatio-temporal reasoning works. Our expected participants outside the STR community would be on the one end geometers/algebraists who see STR works as a development of a new angle in mathematics of qualitative space, on the other end engineers who needs qualitative reasoning in some abstract space.