Geometric Reasoning: A New Paradigm for Processing Geometric Information

CMU-CS-85-144

Jeannette M. Wing, Farhad Arbab oot Computer Science Department, University of Southern California

July 1985

Existing approaches to geometric modeling use rigid, static data structures, often tuned for one specific application. This inflexibility restricts users to inadequate means of manipulating geometric models. Our alternative approach, Geometric Reasoning, applies deductive reasoning to manipulate geometric information at an abstract level. Geometric reasoning is finding attributes of geometric objects using their intrinsic properties, their relationships with other objects, and the inference rules that bind such properties together in a geometric space. Instead of using data structures tailored for numerical computation, we use an inference mechanism that understands the semantics of geometric objects and allows dynamic definition of abstractions, e.g., shapes and relationships.

22 pages

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