Representations and Strategies for Solving Spatial Problems with Diagrams

  • Authors:

  • Bonny Banerjee;B. Chandrasekaran

  • Affiliations:

  • The Ohio State University, USA;The Ohio State University, USA

  • Venue:
  • VLHCC '07 Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Spatial problems (SP) are inevitable in reasoning with diagrams. In this paper, we investigate general representations and computational strategies for a SP-solver such that it can accept problems from a human in a high-level language and output the solution without human intervention. We propose a language in which a variety of domain-independent 2D SPs can be specified in terms of constraints. The constraints are specified in first-order logic over the real domain using a vocabulary of objects, properties, relations and actions. We also propose two general and independent computational strategies -- constraint satisfaction and spatial search -- for autonomously solving the SPs. Ideas about how to make these strategies computationally efficient are discussed and illustrated by examples.