Benjamin Kuipers. 2008.
An intellectual history of the Spatial Semantic Hierarchy.
In Margaret Jefferies and Albert (Wai-Kiang) Yeap (Eds.),
Robot and Cognitive Approaches to Spatial Mapping.
To appear, Springer Verlag, 2008.
This essay is a personal reflection on the evolution of these ideas since their beginning early in 1973 while I was a graduate student at the MIT AI Lab. I attempt to describe how, and due to what influences, my understanding of commonsense knowledge of space has changed over the years since then.