Background and Scope

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in some of the long standing problems in the field of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning. While most previous research only addressed isolated research questions, the research community is putting more and more emphasis on being able to combine different approaches in order to solve larger scale real world problems. Similar to other research communities such as planning or satisfiability, the spatial reasoning community has started to develop a repository of benchmark problems as well as a common representation language which allows to formally define and represent these benchmark problems. This allows researchers to focus their research efforts on solving important problems, on identifying and addressing gaps in existing capabilities, and on integrating the necessary approaches, tools and methodologies. It guides the research of the community into jointly achieving far greater impact and also increases the visibility of the community by emphasising realistic problems that other people can relate to. In other research communities, this approach has significantly strengthened the community and led to a boost in both quantity and quality of results. We hope that it will have a similar effect on our research community.