Review of “Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning” (A. G. Coh and J. Renz, 2007)

Now that I have a better understanding of QSR and the theory behind it, I thought it would be a good idea to reread some articles. I often find, that I can gain greater understanding about research by re-reading articles. This particular article by Cohn and Renz part of a book on Knowledge Representation (KR) (A. G. Cohn and J. Renz, Qualitative Spatial Representation and Reasoning, in: F. van Hermelen, V. Lifschitz, B. Porter, eds., Handbook of Knowledge Representation, Elsevier, 551-596, 2008. ). I had already reread sections 1.1 and 1.2 when I thought of writing about it, so my thoughts on those sections will come at a later point.

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Region Connection Calculus: RCC-8

I have continue my research into the field of QSR and arrived at RCC-8 for the moment. My task is to decide if RCC-8 or one of its descendants will be suitable for our project. Here’s an interesting tidbit before I get started, RCC used to stand for Randell, Cui and Cohn, the authors who first introduced RCC. It has since changed and now refers to Region Connection Calculus, which is a better description. It’s a good thing the the initials didn’t have to change.

Before I talk about the theory behind RCC-8, I think an example is in order. If you can’t wait for my next write-up on RCC-8 go ahead and check out the wikipedia page. I’m also going to borrow the example from the page, but I’m going to show how the path-consistency algorithm works and how the composition table is used. Read more »