The topo-approach to spatial representation and reasoning

Commonsense knowledge about the surrounding physical world and quantitative theories of space, such as metric geometry, can be viewed as two extremes on how human beings relate to space. Qualitative spatial representation and reasoning places itself in between these two approaches. Qualitative spatial reasoning is a set of high-level theories which abstract from the quantitative details and attempt to mimic the human commonsense knowledge about space as much as possible. Successful approaches to spatial reasoning may impact many application areas of AI, most notably, robotics, computer vision in its broader sense, and natural language processing. In this paper, we briefly overview a modal approach to spatial representation and reasoning, called topo-approach.