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J.UCS Special Issue on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning
Hans W. Guesgen (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
hans@cs.auckland.ac.nz
Frank D. Anger (National Science Foundation, USA)
fanger@nsf.gov
Gérard Ligozat (LIMSI, Universite Paris XI, France)
ligozat@limsi.fr
Rita V. Rodríguez (National Science Foundation, USA)
rrodrigu@nsf.gov
Abstract: In the last few decades significant progress has
been made in the area of spatial and temporal reasoning. There is a
growing interest in this area, especially within the artificial
intelligence community, which may be attributed to the large number of
application domains in which one has to deal directly or indirectly
with temporal or spatial information, or both. However, dealing with
time and space is not restricted to artificial intelligence. The
analysis of concurrent programs, for example, faces difficult temporal
questions, while the design of complex hardware for modern computing
machines is plagued by spatial problems. Geographic information
systems, tracking systems, mobile networks, distributed systems,
cooperating autonomous agents, distributed databases, planning, robot
motion, and many other complex systems challenge the capabilities of
existing knowledge representation methods and reasoning
techniques. Even long-standing research areas such as natural language
understanding and production line management are brimming with
unanswered questions about the interpretation and control of time and
space. There is a large body of methods and techniques to attack
problems involving space and time, including non-monotonic and modal
logics, circumscription methods, chronological minimization methods,
relation algebras, and applications of constraint-based reasoning.
At the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IJCAI) in Chambéry, France, a first Workshop on Spatial and Temporal
Reasoning was held with the purpose of both presenting current
research and development in the aforementioned areas and fostering an
interchange of ideas among attendees of differing interests.
In particular, discussion was focused on the interfaces between
three separate concerns: spatial reasoning in AI, temporal reasoning
in AI, and temporal methods for concurrent systems. This effort was
continued at similar workshops at various other IJCAI, ECAI, and AAAI
conferences. Selected authors from two of the recent workshops were
invited to submit extended versions of their papers to this special
issue. Five papers submitted were accepted to this issue of J.UCS. As
the table of contents indicates, the papers that were accepted for
this issue address a variety of aspects involving time and space. It
is beyond the scope of a single issue to do so extensively. As a
result, the selection presented in this issue is just a
snapshot. However, we hope that this snapshot appeals to a large
number of researchers.
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