The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence

This report proposes a qualitative spatial representation focused on the change of shapes, and describes temporal spatial reasoning using this representation. It aims at an application to the developmental biology by symbolically representing a process of development such as cell division and organ formation. In the process, we can find some crucial shape-changes such as bending, getting a hole, division and so on. We propose a language to represent such a characteristics and show the conditions to find possible state transitions from a given state. It enables qualitative simulation and backward reasoning for an observation of an unusual situation.