BittnerDonnelly

July 20-21, 2009

Two-day Course

Spatial Ontology and Qualitative Reasoning This course will provide an introduction to a variety of theories developed for representing and reasoning about spatial relations among entities in the worldand. it will provide students with the tools for developing their own spatial ontologies. Theories treated will include:

i) mereotopologies (theories of parthood and connection relations),

ii) theories of ordering relations,

iii) theories of distance relations.

We will examine also more complex spatial theories which introduce topics such as granularity, change in spatial relations over time, and spatial relations among classes of individuals.

Literature The websites of Thomas Bittner (http://www.buffalo.edu/~bittner3), Maureen Donnelly (http://www.buffalo.edu/~md63), Barry Smith (http://ontology.buffalo.edu/), and the Leeds Qualitative Spatial Reasoning Group (http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/qsr/publications.html) are good sources of literature on spatial theories. In addition, the following contain material appropriate for this class: P. Simons Parts: A Study in Ontology R. Casati and A. Varzi Parts and Places A. N. Whitehead Process and Reality D. Hilbert The Foundations of Geometry Interesting spatial theories which are appropriate for this class can also be found in the papers of Theodore de Laguna, E. V. Huntington, Alfred Tarski, Giangiacomo Gerla, Andrew Frank, Laure Vieu, Carola Eschenbach, and Hedda Schmitdke.

Thomas Bittner

Thomas Bittner is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Geography at the State University of New York at Buffalo. At the same time he is Research Scientist in the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences and the National Center of Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). Dr. Bittner received his Ph.D. from the Technical University Vienna and has been a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and at Queen’s University (Canada). Before joining the SUNY Buffalo he was a senior researcher at the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) at Saarland University in Germany. Dr. Bittner’s area of specialization is formal ontology and its applications in bio-informatics, geography, and geographic information science. His current research focuses on the application of formal ontology, symbolic logic, and qualitative representation and reasoning techniques (a) to represent canonical biomedical structures in biomedical ontologies, (b) to detect pathological structures in medical image analysis, and (c) to develop axiomatic theories of biomedical structures and processes across different levels of granularity.