Qualitative Spatial Knowledge Acquisition Based on the Connection Relation

摘要

Research in cognitive psychology shows that the connection relation is the primitive spatial relation. This paper proposes a novel spatial knowledge representation of indoor en- vironments based on the connection relation, and demonstrates how deictic orientation relations can be acquired from a map, which is constructed purely on connection relations between extended objects. Without loss of generality, we restrict indoor environments to be constructed by a set of rectangles, each representing either a room or a corridor. The term fiat cell is coined to represent a subjective partition along a corridor. Spatial knowledge includes rectangles, sides information of rectangles, connection relations among rectangles, and fiat cells of rectangles. Efficient algorithms are given for identifying one shortest path between two locations, transforming paths into fiat paths, and acquiring deictic orientations.