A Spatial Model Based on the Notions of Spatial Conceptual Map and of Object's Influence Areas

In this paper we propose a new spatial model based on the notions of spatial conceptual map and of object's influence areas. A Spatial Conceptual Map is a data structure which is analog to mental images that people mentally use to reason about space while an influence area is a portion of space that people mentally build around spatial objects to take into account neighborhood. Using these two notions, we formally define the properties of neighborhood, orientation and distance in a qualitative way. In order to show how this model can be used to solve real world problems, we developed the GRAAD system, which generates routes and provides natural language descriptions that are similar to those created by human subjects. We also performed an experiment involving human subjects to know if routes and route descriptions provided by GRAAD are cognitively adequate. The results of this experiment were positive in that they showed that GRAAD output's cannot be distinguished from those generated by human subjects.

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