Inference in cognitive maps

Cognitive mapping is a qualitative decision modeling technique developed over twenty years ago by political scientists, which continues to see occasional use in social science and decision-aiding applications. In this paper, I show how cognitive maps can be viewed in the context of more recent formalisms for qualitative decision modeling, and how the latter provide a firm semantic foundation that can facilitate the development of more powerful inference procedures as well as extensions in expressiveness for models of this sort.