This section gives a description of notions used throughout this study. Current achievements in developing action-centered ontologies are also discussed. 2.1 Ontologies In the context of information extraction and retrieval, different kinds of ontologies can be distinguished 15]: - Top-level ontologies describe very general concepts like space and time, not depending on a particular domain, - Domain ontologies and task ontologies describe the vocabulary related to a generic domain or kind of task, detailing the terms used in the top-level ontology, - Application ontologies describe the...

This book constitutes the documentation of the results achieved within a proirity program on spatial cognition established by the German Science Foundation (DFG) in 1996 involving 13 research groups in Germany and leading scientists from abroad.
The 22 revised full papers included were first presented during a colloquium in fall 1997 and then went through a second round of thorough reviewing. The book is organized into three parts on spatial knowledge acquisition and spatial memory, formal and linguistic models, and navigation in real and virtual worlds. All in all the book is a unique...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 29th Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI 2006, held in Bremen, Germany, in June 2006. This was co-located with RoboCup 2006, the innovative robot soccer world championship, and with ACTUATOR 2006, the 10th International Conference on New Actuators. The 29 revised full papers presented together with two invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 112 submissions.

Spatial cognition is an interdisciplinary research area involving artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, geography, mathematics, biology, theoretical computer science, architecture, design, and philosophy of mind. As these different disciplines gain a deeper understanding of their fellow disciplines and their research approaches, they increasingly find ways to combine their insights and to conceive powerful mechanisms to analyze and synthesize cognitive systems. Spatial cognition has now reached a point where we can see how different pieces of the puzzle may...

Spatialcognitionisconcernedwiththewayshumans, animals, ormachinesthink about real or abstract space and also with the ways spatial structures can be used for reasoning. Thus, space is considered both, as an object of cognition and as ameans of cognition. Spatial cognition is an interdisciplinary research areainvolvingapproachesfromarti?cialintelligence, cognitivepsychology, ge- raphy, mathematics, biology, design, theoretical computer science, architecture, andphilosophy.Researchonspatialcognitionhasprogressedrapidlyduringthe past few years. The disciplines contributing to the ?eld have moved...