Spatial Reasoning with Propositional Logics

I present a method for reasoning about spatial relationships on the basis of entailments in propositional logic. Formalisms for representing topological and other spatial information (e.g. [2] [10] [11]) have generally employed the 1st-order predicate calculus. Whilst this language is much more expressive than 0-order (propositional) calculi it is correspondingly harder to reason with. Hence, by encoding spatial relationships in a propositional representation automated reasoning becomes more effective. I specify representations in both classical and intuitionistic propositional logic, which --- together with well-defined meta-level reasoning algorithms --- provide for efficient reasoning about a large class of spatial relations. 1 INTRODUCTION This work has developed out of research done by Randell, Cui and Cohn (henceforth RCC) on formalising spatial and temporal concepts used in describing physical situations [11]. A set of classical 1st-order logic axioms has been formulated in whi..