Modal and Relevance Logics for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning
Abstract
Qualitative Spatial Reasoning (QSR) is an alternative technique to represent spatial relations
without using numbers. Regions and their relationships are used as qualitative terms. Mostly
peer qualitative spatial reasonings has two aspect: (a) the first aspect is based on inclusion
and it focuses on the ”part-of” relationship. This aspect is mathematically covered by
mereology. (b) the second aspect focuses on topological nature, i.e., whether they are in
”contact” without having a common part. Mereotopology is a mathematical theory that
covers these two aspects.
The theoretical aspect of this thesis is to use classical propositional logic with non-classical
relevance logic to obtain a logic capable of reasoning about Boolean algebras i.e., the
mereological aspect of QSR. Then, we extended the logic further by adding modal logic
operators in order to reason about topological contact i.e., the topological aspect of QSR.
Thus, we name this logic Modal Relevance Logic (MRL). We have provided a natural
deduction system for this logic by defining inference rules for the operators and constants
used in our (MRL) logic and shown that our system is correct. Furthermore, we have used
the functional programming language and interactive theorem prover Coq to implement
the definitions and natural deduction rules in order to provide an interactive system for
reasoning in the logic.