Qualitative temporal reasoning: theory and practice

Summary form only. The theory of qualititative temporal reasoning has evolved considerably in the last 15 years. We now know large tractable subsets of the interval algebra and have efficient inference algorithms for the full algebra. However, there are not many applications that make use of these results. I first sketch the development of the theory of qualitative temporal reasoning and then report on two applications of the qualitative interval algebra. The first application is an abstract, academic one in cognitive science using the theoretical findings in order to design experiments for testing hypotheses about the construction of mental models. The second application is in the area of document interpretation using a two-dimensional version of the interval algebra