Aims and Scope

Aims and Scope

Qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning, a subfield of AI that has evolved over the past 25 years, aims at the development of formalisms for representing spatial and temporal information, as typically communicated in human-machine interaction processes in spatial environments. With regard to applications, the symbolic languages and reasoning techniques in this field need to be tested against an integrated set of evaluation criteria known from computer and cognitive science.

The aim of the symposium is to underpin the development of theoretically well-founded and community-wide accepted evaluation standards and benchmarking problems for qualitative formalisms, reasoning techniques, and implemented reasoning systems. This includes the measures to compare different qualitative constraint formalisms in terms of cognitive adequacy, expressiveness, and computational efficiency; the development of a domain and problem specification language for benchmarking problems; the identification of significant benchmark domains and problem instances, and the creation of a problem repository; and the measures to evaluate the performance of reasoning systems.

The identification of benchmarking problems and the development of benchmark suites has had a significant impact on the advancement in different computer science and knowledge engineering domains (for example, AI planning, automated theorem proving, SAT, and CSP). We expect analogous benefits from benchmarking in the qualitative reasoning domain. In particular, the symposium will contribute to identify a graded set of challenges for future research and will push the development of qualitative reasoning methods and systems towards application-relevant problems.

Symposium format

The symposium program will include invited talks, a limited number of short presentations as well as a tool or poster demonstration session such that researchers in the field can present their current work on benchmarking of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning systems, significant use cases for qualitative reasoning, and more general mid-term and long-term challenges in the field. Topics for working group sessions include qualitative reasoners, language standards for calculus and problem instance specifications, application-driven benchmark cases, and measures for the cognitive adequacy of qualitative formalisms.