People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial...

Diagrams are essential in most fields of human activity. There is substan tial interest in diagrams and their use in many academic disciplines for the potential benefits they may confer on a wide range of tasks. Are we now in a position to claim that we have a science of diagrams-that is, a science which takes the nature of diagrams and their use as the central phenom ena of interest? If we have a science of diagrams it is certainly constituted from multiple disciplines, including cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence, logic, mathematics, and others. If there is a science of...

People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial...