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 straighforward switching between calculi
• being easily integrable into own applications.

SparQ can be run on most POSIX systems such as for example Linux, Mac OS X, or Solaris.

Documentation

A detailed documentation of the recent version of SparQ (V0.7.4) is available in PDF format.

Download

Click here to download sparq-0.7.4.tar.gz

Click here to download a Mac OS X binary release including the SparQ Shell

What's new?

SparQ and QSR tutorial at Cosit

There will be a SparQ-based tutorial at Cosit 2013 in Scarborough, UK. We are working hard to have a brandnew SparQ version ready by end of August - stay tuned!

Pritom Rajkhowa and Abhijit Boruah developed a Java GUI for SparQ interaction which they share; thanks guys!

April 2010

released V0.7.4

• improved algebraic reasoning module
• improved support of 64Bit systems

December 2009

released V0.7.3.1 - bugfix release to V0.7.3; concerns only the building process, not the functionality

October 2009

released SparQ Shell for Mac OS X

January 2009

released V0.7.3 - minor improvements and fixes; added variable support

November 2008

released V0.7.2 - bug fix release

January 2008

released V0.7.1

• New features: ternary composition for ternary calculi, algebraic closure using ternary composition

July, 16th 2007

released V0.7 - major update

• Major change: calculi-dependent automatic recompiling during runtime to increase speed
• Major change: calculi-dependent relation representation
• More precomputation when compiling calculi
• Improved the general heuristics in a-closure
• Improved heuristics in backtracking search
• Introduced algebraic specification

July 2006

released V0.6 - first 'public' release

Related Publications

Frank Dylla, Till Mossakowski, Thomas Schneider, and Diedrich Wolter. Algebraic Properties of Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Calculi, Proceedings of Cosit 2013, to appear; an according arXiv report isavailable online

Jae Hee Lee, Jochen Renz, and Diedrich Wolter. StarVars -- Effective Reasoning about Relative Direction Information, Proceedings of IJCAI 2013, to appear

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, Universität Bremen, July 2006.

Please consult draft versions for overview only, contact us if you cannot access a paper.