What is space? Is there space when there are objects to occupy it or is there space only when
there are no objects to occupy it? Can there be space without objects? These are old
philosophical questions that concern the ontology of space in the philosophical sense of
¿ontology¿ ¿ what is the nature of space? Cognitive science in general and arti?cial
intelligence in particular are less c- cerned with the nature of things than with their mental
conceptualizations. In spatial cognition research we address questions like What do we know
about space? How is space represented? What are the representational entities? What are the
rep- sentational structures? Answers to these questions are described in what is called
ontologies in arti?cial intelligence. Different tasks require different knowledge and
different representations of knowledge facilitate different ways of solving problems. In this
book Jan Oliver Wallgrün develops and investigates representational structures to support
tasks of autonomous mobile robots from the acquisition of knowledge to the use of this
knowledge for navigation. The research presented is concerned with the robot mapping problem
the pr- lem of building a spatial representation of an environment that is perceived by s- sors
that only provide incomplete and uncertain information this information usually needs to be
related to other imprecise or uncertain information. The routes a robot can take can be
abstractly described in terms of graphs where alternative routes are represented by alternative
branches in these route graphs.
