SparQ—Spatial Reasoning done Qualitatively
A Toolbox for Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning in Applications
Overview
SparQ is a collection of tools for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning in applications released as free software under GNU GPL. The goals of SparQ are providing reference implementations for spatial calculi from the QSR community making specifying and integrating new calculi easy providing typical procedures required to apply QSR in a convenient way offering a uniform interface that allows straightforward switching between calculi being easily integrable into own applications. SparQ can be run on most POSIX systems such as for example Linux or Mac OS X. Using Docker (container dwolter/sparq), SparQ can be run conviently on any system.
Documentation
The most recent published documentation (which includes a brief introduction to qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning) is available here(752.7 KB, 81 pages), up-to-date information is available through GitHub.
Getting SparQ
SparQ is now available as a docker container (dwolter/sparq) – this allows easy installation on almost all systems (hopefully best option if you just want to use SparQ).
The most recent source package including documentation is available from GitHub, including the developer branch (best option if you consider modifying/adding calculi or new tools). There also is a pre-built binary for MacOS which includes a simple GUI.
What's new?
- April 2017: updated documentation to explain SparQ's dynamic extension mechanism
- May 2015: SparQ is now on Docker; some fixes and extensions have been uploaded too.
- September 2014: SparQ is now on GitHub!
- September 2014: this web page – browse older news at the old Bremen site
Related Publications
some papers that directly relate to SparQ:
- Frank Dylla, Jae Hee Lee, Till Mossakowski, Thomas Schneider, André van Delden, Jasper van de Ven, and Diedrich Wolter. A Survey of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Calculi: Algebraic and Computational Properties, ACM Computing Surveys 50, 1, Article 7, 2017, earlier version available as arXiv report
- Frank Dylla, Till Mossakowski, Thomas Schneider, and Diedrich Wolter. Algebraic Properties of Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Calculi, Proceedings of Cosit 2013; an extended version is available as arXiv report
- Jae Hee Lee, Jochen Renz, and Diedrich Wolter. StarVars—Effective Reasoning about Relative Direction Information, Proceedings of IJCAI 2013
- Diedrich Wolter. Analyzing Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Calculi using Algebraic Geometry (final draft version), Spatial Cognition and Computation 12(1), pp. 23-52, 2012
- Diedrich Wolter and Jan Olliver Wallgrün. Qualitative Spatial Reasoning for Applications: New Challenges and the SparQ Toolbox (final draft version), In: Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Representation and Reasoning: Trends and Future Directions, Shyamanta M. Hazarika (eds), 2011
- Diedrich Wolter. SparQ—a spatial reasoning toolbox, In: Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium on Benchmarking of Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning Systems, 2009
- Diedrich Wolter and Lyudmila Moshagen. Algebraic methods for analyzing qualitative spatio-temporal calculi, In: Proceedings of ECAI-Workshop on spatial and temporal reasoning, 2008
- Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Lutz Frommberger, Diedrich Wolter, Frank Dylla, and Christian Freksa. A toolbox for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. In In: T. Barkowsky, M. Knauff, G. Ligozat, & D. Montello (Eds.), Spatial Cognition V: Reasoning, Action, Interaction: International Conference Spatial Cognition 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4387, pp. 39-58. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2007
- Frank Dylla, Lutz Frommberger, Jan Oliver Wallgrün, and Diedrich Wolter. SparQ: A toolbox for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Qualitative Constraint Calculi: Application and Integration at KI 2006, Bremen, Germany, June 2006.
- Jan Oliver Wallgrün, Lutz Frommberger, Frank Dylla, and Diedrich Wolter. SparQ User Manual V0.6. Technical Report 007-07/2006, Cognitive Systems - SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition, Universit?t Bremen, July 2006.