Reasoning about Qualitative Direction and Distance between Extended Objects using Answer Set Programming

In this thesis, we introduce a novel formal framework to represent and reason about qualitative di-rection and distance relations between extended objects using Answer Set Programming (ASP). We take Cardinal Directional Calculus (CDC) as a starting point and extend CDC with new sorts of con-straints which involve defaults, preferences and negation. We call this extended version as nCDC. Then we further extend nCDC by augmenting qualitative distance relation and name this extension as nCDC+. For CDC, nCDC, nCDC+, we introduce an ASP-based general framework to solve con-sistency checking problems, address composition and inversion of qualitative spatial relations, infer unknown or missing relations between objects, and find a suitable configuration of objects which fulfills a given inquiry.