Increasing the expressiveness of qualitative spatial calculi is an essential step towards meeting the requirements of applications. This can be achieved by combining existing calculi in a way that we can express spatial information using relations from both calculi. The great challenge is to develop reasoning algorithms that are correct and complete when reasoning over the combined information. Previous work has mainly studied cases where the interaction between the combined calculi was small, or where one of the two calculi was very simple. In this paper we tackle the important combination of topological and directional information for extended spatial objects. We combine some of the best known calculi in qualitative spatial reasoning (QSR), the RCC8 algebra for representing topological information, and the Rectangle Algebra (RA) and the Cardinal Direction Calculus (CDC) for directional information. Although CDC is more expressive than RA, reasoning with CDC is of the same order as reasoning with RA. We show that reasoning with basic RCC8 and basic RA relations is in P, but reasoning with basic RCC8 and basic CDC relations is NP-Complete. 1

The very nature of topology and its close relation to how humans perceive space and time make mereotopology an indispensable part of any comprehensive framework for qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning (QSTR). Within QSTR, it has by far the longest history, dating back to descriptions of phenomenological processes in nature (Husserl, 1913; Whitehead, 1920, 1929) – what we call today ‘commonsensical ’ in Artificial Intelligence. There have been plenty of other motivations to

In this paper we study a recent formal model for qualitative spatial reasoning with cardinal direction relations. We give an O(n 4) algorithm to check the consistency of a network of basic cardinal constraints with variables ranging over the set of connected regions homeomorphic to the closed unit disk (which includes a wide variety of irregularshaped regions). To the best of our knowledge, this was an open problem. A previous algorithm for a domain that includes also disconnected regions works in O(n 5), but, for the problem we consider here, such an algorithm cannot be used. Using the new algorithm we also show that the problem of deciding the consistency of a network of disjunctive cardinal constraints with variables ranging over the set of connected regions is NP-Complete. Our main contribution is based on results from the field of combinatorial geometry. 1

Current research on qualitative spatial representation and reasoning mainly focuses on one single aspect of space. In real world applications, however, multiple spatial aspects are often involved simultaneously. This paper investigates problems arising in reasoning with combined topological and directional information. We use the RCC8 algebra and the Rectangle Algebra (RA) for expressing topological and directional information respectively. We give examples to show that the bipathconsistency algorithm Bipath-Consistency is incomplete for solving even basic RCC8 and RA constraints. If topological constraints are taken from some maximal tractable subclasses of RCC8, and directional constraints are taken from a subalgebra, termed DIR49, of RA, then we show that Bipath-Consistency is able to separate topological constraints from directional ones. This means, given a set of hybrid topological and directional constraints from the above subclasses of RCC8 and RA, we can transfer the joint satisfaction problem in polynomial time to two independent satisfaction problems in RCC8 and RA. For general RA constraints, we give a method to compute solutions that satisfy all topological constraints and approximately satisfy each RA constraint to any prescribed precision. 1