Modeling the Basic Meanings of Path Relations

Abstract

In the field of spatial reasoning, point-to-point relations have been thoroughly examined, but only little attention has been payed to the modeling of path relations. We propose a computational model that extends the existing referential semantics for point-to-point relations to path relations. On the linguistic side, we present some research on German path prepositions as well as results on their English counterparts. This analysis of path prepositions is used to extract a semantic model for path relations. On the geometric side, we examine the characteristics of trajectories and propose a computational method to find an appropriate path relation for a given situation. Finally, we show how our findings on the linguistic and the geometric sides can be brought together to form a consistent model. 1