Unit Testing for Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning

Commonsense reasoning, in particular qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning (QSTR), provides flexible and intuitive methods for reasoning about vague and uncertain information including spatial orientation, topology and proximity.  Despite a number of theoretical advances in QSTR, there are relatively few applications that employ these methods.  The central problem is a significant lack of application level standards and validation methods for supporting developers in adapting and integrating QSTR with their domain specific qualitative spatial and temporal models.  To address this we present a significantly novel methodology for QSTR application validation, inspired by research in software engineering.  In this paper we focus on unit testing, and adapt the software engineering strategy of defining boundary cases.  We present two critical boundary concepts, a methodology for isolating the units under testing from other parts of the model, and methods to assist the designer in integrating our critical boundary unit testing approach with a broader validation plan.