Analysing the familiar : reasoning about space and time in the everyday world

Abstract

The development of suitable explicit representations of knowledge that can be manipulated by general purpose inference mechanisms has always been central to Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, there has been a distinct lack of rigorous formalisms in the literature that can be used to model domain knowledge associated with the everyday physical world. If AI is to succeed in building automata that can function reasonably well in unstructured physical domains, the development and utility of such formalisms must be secured. This thesis describes a first order axiomatic theory that can be used to encode much topological and metrical information that arises in our everyday dealings with the physical world. The formalism is notable for the minimal assumptions required in order to lift up a very general framework that can cover the representation of much intuitive spatial and temporal knowledge. The basic ontology assumes regions that can be either spatial or temporal and over which a set of relations and functions are defined. The resulting partitioning of these abstract spaces, allow complex relationships between objects and the description of processes to be formally represented. This also provides a useful foundation to control the proliferation of inference commonly associated with mechanised logics. Empirical information extracted from the domain is added and mapped to these basic structures showing how further control of inference can be secured. The representational power of the formalism and computational tractability of the general methodology proposed is substantiated using two non-trivial domain problems - modelling phagocytosis and exocytosis of uni-cellular organisms, and modelling processes arising during the cycle of operations of a force pump