  The precomputational literature in philosophical logic relating to spatial reasoning is very sparse in relation, for instance, to the temporal literature. The need to support computational reasoning about space, however, in application areas such as motion planning and manipulation in physical space, the indexing and retrieval of images, geographic information systems, diagrammatic reasoning, and the design of high-level graphics programs has led to new interest in spatial representations and spatial reasoning. Of course, the geometrical tradition provides an exceptionally strong mathematical resource for this enterprise. But as in many other AI-related areas, it is not clear that the available mathematical theories are appropriate for informing these applications, and many computer scientists have felt it worthwhile to develop new foundations. Some of this work is closely related to the research in qualitative reasoning mentioned above in  Section 2.2,  and in some cases has been carried out by the same individuals. 