August 5, 2007

Organiser

• Michael Zakharyaschev (Birkbeck, University of London, email: michael@dcs.bbk.ac.uk)

Invited speakers

• Ian Pratt-Hartmann (University of Manchester)
• Dimiter Vakarelov (Sofia University)

Provisional timetable

Location

The workshop will take place at the Computing Laboratory, at the corner of Parks road and Keble road, i.e. nr 14 on the map (some maps covering a larger area: colleges and halls, Oxford ring road).

Lodging

TANCL ’07 - Venue and Accommodation.

Abstracts

Foundations of Mereotopology
Ian Pratt-Hartmann
(University of Manchester)

Following seminal work by A.N. Whitehead in the 1920s, various authors have expressed the conviction that a parsimonious and conceptually elegant treatment of space can be obtained by adopting an ontology in which regions, rather than points, are the primitive entities - an enterprise which we might term 'mereogeometry'. Latterly, this interest has led to the development of calculi of topological relations in which variables range over certain subsets (rather than points) of various topological spaces. The foundation for these 'mereotopological' calculi is furnished by a collection of representation theorems, of independent mathematical interest. This talk surveys these foundational results, with particular emphasis on mereotopological calculi interpreted over low-dimensional Euclidean spaces.