Bøger af Christian Freksa

This is the fourth volume in a series of books dedicated to basic research in spatial cognition. Spatial cognition is a field that investigates the connection between the physical spatial world and the mental world. Philosophers and researchers have p- posed various views concerning the relation between the physical and the mental worlds: Plato considered pure concepts of thought as separate from their physical manifestations while Aristotle considered the physical and the mental realms as two aspects of the same substance. Descartes, a dualist, discussed the interaction between body and soul through an interface organ and thus introduced a functional view that presented a challenge for the natural sciences and the humanities. In modern psych- ogy, the relation between the physical and the cognitive space has been investigated using thorough experiments, and in artificial intelligence we have seen views as diverse as 'problems can be solved on a representation of the world' and 'a representation of the world is not necessary. ' Today's spatial cognition work establishes a correspondence between the mental and the physical worlds by studying and exploiting their interaction; it investigates how mental space and spatial "e;reality"e; join together in understanding the world and in interacting with it. The physical and representational aspects are equally important in this work. Almost all topics of cognitive science manifest themselves in spatial cognition.

Research on spatial cognition is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary enterprise for the study of spatial representations and cognitive spatial processes, be they real or abstract, human or machine. Spatial cognition brings together a variety of - search methodologies: empirical investigations on human and animal orientation and navigation; studies of communicating spatial knowledge using language and graphical or other pictorial means; the development of formal models for r- resenting and processing spatial knowledge; and computer implementations to solve spatial problems, to simulate human or animal orientation and navigation behavior, or to reproduce spatial communication patterns. These approaches can interact in interesting and useful ways: Results from empirical studies call for formal explanations both of the underlying memory structures and of the processes operating upon them; we can develop and - plement operational computer models obeying the relationships between objects and events described by the formal models; we can empirically test the computer models under a variety of conditions, and we can compare the results to the - sults from the human or animal experiments. A disagreement between these results can provide useful indications towards the re nement of the models.

The Conference on Spatial Information Theory - COSIT - grew out of a series of workshops / NATO Advanced Study Institutes / NSF specialist meetings concerned with cognitive and applied aspects of representing large-scale space, particularly geographic space. In these meetings, the need for a well-founded theory of spatial information processing was identified. The COSIT conference series was established in 1993 as a biennial interdisciplinary European conference on the representation and processing of information about large-scale space, after a successful international conference on the topic had been organized by Andrew Frank et al. in Pisa, Italy, in 1992 (frequently referred to as 'COSIT zero'). After two successful European conferences with strong North-American participation (COSIT '93, held on the Island of Elba, Italy; COSIT '95, held in Semmering, Austria), the conference became a truly international enterprise when COSIT '97 was held in the Laurel Highlands, Pennsylvania, USA. COSIT '99 will take place in Stade, Germany. All aspects of large-scale space, i. e. spaces too large to be seen from a single vantage point, are addressed in the COSIT conferences. These include spaces of geographic scale, as well as smaller spaces in which humans, animals, or autonomous robots have to find their way around. Spatial information theory also deals with the description of objects, processes, or events in spatial environments and it forms the foundation for the construction of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and for spatial information and communication system design in general.