Reasoning about vague topological information

Abstract

Topological information plays a fundamental role in the human perception of spatial configurations and is thereby one of the most prominent geographical features in natural language. As vagueness abounds in geography, flexible formalisms with the ability to capture vague topological information are often needed in practice. While such formalisms have already been introduced by various authors, complete reasoning procedures are usually not discussed. In this paper, we show how many interesting reasoning tasks, such as consistency checking and entailment checking, can be supported in a generalization of the well-known RCC-8 calculus. In particular, we present decision procedures based on linear programming, solving all reasoning tasks of interest. We furthermore show how deciding the consistency of vague topological information can be reduced to the consistency problem of the original RCC-8.