Qualitative reasoning
Encyclopedia
Qualitative Reasoning is an area of research within Artificial Intelligence
(AI) that automates reasoning about continuous aspects of the physical world, such as space, time, and quantity, for the purpose of problem solving and planning using qualitative rather than quantitative information. Qualitative Reasoning creates non-numerical descriptions of physical systems and their behavior, preserving important behavioral properties and qualitative distinctions.
The goal of qualitative reasoning research is to develop representation and reasoning methods that enable programs to reason about the behavior of physical systems, without precise quantitative information. An example is observing pouring rain and the steadily rising water level of a river, which is sufficient information to take action against possible flooding without knowing the exact water level, the rate of change, or the time the river might flood. Successful application areas include autonomous spacecraft support, failure analysis and on-board diagnosis of vehicle systems, automated generation of control software for photocopiers, conceptual knowledge capture in ecology, and intelligent aids for human learning.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
(AI) that automates reasoning about continuous aspects of the physical world, such as space, time, and quantity, for the purpose of problem solving and planning using qualitative rather than quantitative information. Qualitative Reasoning creates non-numerical descriptions of physical systems and their behavior, preserving important behavioral properties and qualitative distinctions.
The goal of qualitative reasoning research is to develop representation and reasoning methods that enable programs to reason about the behavior of physical systems, without precise quantitative information. An example is observing pouring rain and the steadily rising water level of a river, which is sufficient information to take action against possible flooding without knowing the exact water level, the rate of change, or the time the river might flood. Successful application areas include autonomous spacecraft support, failure analysis and on-board diagnosis of vehicle systems, automated generation of control software for photocopiers, conceptual knowledge capture in ecology, and intelligent aids for human learning.
See also
- Spatial-temporal reasoning
- Qualitative Reasoning GroupQualitative Reasoning GroupThe Qualitative Reasoning Group at Northwestern University, led by Ken Forbus conducts artificial intelligence and cognitive science research on qualitative representations and reasoning, as well as analogical reasoning and learning...
(QRG) - Object-Centered High-level REference ontologyObject-centered high-level reference ontologyThe Object-Centered High-level REference ontology is an upper ontology , a formal ontological framework whose purpose is to describe very general concepts that are the same across all knowledge domains....
(OCHRE)