Dynamic Symbol Grounding: Changing Referents in Engineering Analysis and Spatial Environments

Matthew Evans Klenk

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a challenging class of problems for Cognitive Systems reasoning in spatio-temporal environments. Consider a safe area in a military engagement. The safe area refers to a region in the environment. The size, shape, and location of this region is a function of the goals and capabilities of the other agents in the environment. Furthermore, this context will change over time and thereby changing the reference of this abstraction. We call such regions context-dependent spatial regions. Through an analogy with the qualitative abstractions used in the design and analysis of engineered systems, we explore this representational problem and some possible solutions.