This paper proposes ontology-guided reasoning for affordance-based explanations of robot navigation. In human environments, it is not sufficient for a robot to detect that its route is blocked. It must also reason about what nearby objects afford, which state changes are possible, and which of these changes would allow it to continue safely. We address this problem by representing nearby entities, their affordances, affordance states, and qualitative spatial relations in a local affordance ontology and by evaluating hypothetical object--affordance state changes as candidate explanation factors. This yields explanations that are not only semantically grounded but also actionable. We instantiate the approach in a lightweight benchmark centered on a robot librarian scenario and evaluate it on procedurally generated navigation cases. The results show that ontology-guided reasoning identifies relevant explanation factors more accurately than a semantic-only baseline and remains robust as semantic clutter increases. Overall, the paper argues that affordance ontologies can serve not merely as semantic descriptions of the environment, but as reasoning foundations for explainability and reliable robot autonomy.

This study scrutinizes five years of Sarajevo’s Air Quality Index (AQI) data using diverse machine learning models — Fourier autoregressive integrated moving average (Fourier ARIMA), Prophet, and Long short-term memory (LSTM)—to forecast AQI levels. Focusing on various prediction frames, we evaluate model performances and identify optimal strategies for different temporal granularities. Our research unveils subtle insights into each model’s efficacy, shedding light on their strengths and limitations in predicting AQI across varied timeframes. This research presents a robust framework for automatic optimization of AQI predictions, emphasizing the influence of temporal granularity on prediction accuracy, automatically selecting the most efficient models and parameters. These insights hold significant implications for data-driven decision-making in urban air quality control, paving the way for proactive and targeted interventions to improve air quality in Sarajevo and similar urban environments.