Tutorials
There will be two half-day tutorials at COSIT 2013, which will take place on the first day of the conference, September 2nd. The tutorials are:
Morning September 2nd
Graphs and their embeddings as found in spatial information theory
Dr Michael Worboys
Professor of Spatial Informatics, University of Greenwich, London, England
Mike has a PhD in mathematics and has through his career sought to find connections
between mathematics, computer science, and the science of spatial information. He has
authored/edited several books and many journal and conference papers on these topics,
and has offered several tutorials and keynotes on related issues. Mike is editor-in-chief of
the Journal of Spatial Information Science.
Overview
Graphs and graph theory form an important foundation for spatial information theory. Of special interest is what happens when graphs are embedded (i.e., form part of) surfaces. The aim of the tutorial is to introduce the audience to the large variety of graphs and their spatial embeddings, describe some of the main theoretical results and survey the many applications in spatial information theory. We will also look at some of the hot research questions that arise in this field.
Learning Objectives
- Review fundamental results on undirected and directed graphs.
- Review the many applications of graphs in spatial information science.
- Understand symbolic approaches to the embeddings of graphs in surfaces and review applications.
- Understand how these approaches may enhance our understanding of types of spatial change.
- Appreciate recent extensions to embeddings in 3-D space.
Target Audience
The tutorial will be of particular interest to students and established researchers looking for an overview of these important theoretical constructions, and some ideas as to how they might fit into their own research agendas. No advanced knowledge of formal theory is required, but an interest in the formal underpinnings of our science would be helpful. We hope for and welcome an audience with a diverse range of backgrounds.
Description
- Review of basic graph theory concepts, definitions, and results.
- Review of past and current applications of “pure” graphs to spatial information theoretic topics such as wayfinding.
- Introduction to the theory of 2-D graph embeddings, their formal representation as rotation graphs and combinatorial maps, and their application to spatial information theory.
- Discussion of recent extensions to combinatorial maps for embeddings of non-connected graphs.
- Discussion of the applications of this work to spatial, and in particular to topological change.
- Discussion of future research directions on 3-D graph embeddings and their potential application to spatial information theory.
- Question and answer session on the relevance of this work to participants’ research agendas.
Afternoon September 2nd
Qualitative Spatial Reasoning and the SparQ Toolbox
Dr Diedrich Wolter
Research Center "Spatial Cognition", University of Bremen, Germany
Diedrich researches qualitative spatial reasoning and its applications
with intelligent agents; he develops the SparQ reasoning toolbox.
Dr Jan Oliver Wallgrün
Department of Geography, GeoVISTA center, The Pennsylvania State University, USA
Jan Oliver researches qualitative spatial reasoning and its
application in GIScience; he develops the SparQ reasoning toolbox.
Dr Reinard Moratz
National Center of Geographic Information and Analysis, University of Maine, USA
Reinhard researches spatial knowledge representation in cognitive systems.
Overview
The aim of this tutorial is to show how qualitative reasoning can solve problems involving abstract knowledge about space and time. We give examples of how practical problems of spatial knowledge processing can be tackled using the spatial reasoning toolbox SparQ (http://www.sfbtr8.uni-bremen.de/project/r3/sparq/).
Learning Objectives
- Learn about qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning and gain an overview of existing qualitative formalisms.
- Be introduced to various applications areas and reasoning problems.
- Learn about existing tools and gain hands-on experience with the spatial reasoning toolbox SparQ.
Target Audience
Researchers, graduate students, and practitioners with an interest in spatial information science. No advanced knowledge is required, but basic knowledge in computer science or mathematics would be helpful.
Description
- Introduction to the theory underlying qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning.
- Overview of existing calculi and their properties.
- Introduction to qualitative spatial reasoning problems and techniques.
- Example application of qualitative spatio-temporal reasoning in various domains.
- Realizing qualitative reasoning with existing tools, in particular SparQ.