Generating qualitative spatial descriptions of floor plans

Problem

Can we use qualitative spatial representation frameworks to capture the everyday knowledge that goes into arranging a room?

Background

Given a drawn floor plan, it is relatively simple to create a quantitative description of the environment: a scaled description of the precise position and geometric characteristics of each piece of furniture.  However, a much harder problem is generating a qualitative description that can describe some of the functionality of a particular room.  For example, given the position of a couch, lamps, and television in a family room, the relative locations of the furniture allow us to make other inferences (e.g., that an unidentified block is probably a coffee table, that the couch is set up to watch the television).

Deliverables

• Read 3-5 basic papers on qualitative spatial representation (these will be provided by the sponsor).
• Use the GeoRep diagrammatic reasoning toolkit [4] to put together a simple room reasoning system.
• Write a 3-5 summary report detailing how you approached the problem, what your results were, and prospects for future work.  What sorts of knowledge were these systems best at capturing?

Evaluation will by done by the sponsor based on the report and the submitted code.

References (Available from sponsor)

      [1]   Forbus, K. D., Ferguson, R. W., & Usher, J. M. (2000). Boundary-based multimodal input for geographic planning sketches. In P. Healy (Ed.), Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Interactive Graphical Communication . London: Queen Mary College, University of London.

      [2]   Ferguson, R. W., Rasch, R. A. J., Turmel, W., & Forbus, K. D. (2000). Qualitative spatial interpretation of Course-of-Action diagrams, Proceedings of the 14th International Workshop on Qualitative Reasoning . Morelia, Mexico.

      [3]   Forbus, K. D., Ferguson, R. W., & Usher, J. M. (2000). Towards a computational model of sketching, Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces . Sante Fe, New Mexico.

      [4]   Ferguson, R. W., & Forbus, K. D. (2000). GeoRep: A flexible tool for spatial representation of line drawings, Proceedings of the 18th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Austin, Texas: AAAI Press.