Representing and reasoning about changing spatial extensions of geographic features

Abstract

This paper presents a logical framework for representing and reasoning about events and processes which are characterised by changes in the spatial extension of geographic features. This work addresses some crucial (and still open) issues on the modelling of geographic dynamics, such as how to represent the relationship between events, processes and geographic features and how to relate event and process types to their particular instances; how to handle spatial and temporal vagueness to associate specific spatio-temporal boundaries with events and process instances; and how to provide a flexible representation which can be applied to distinct geographic phenomena as well as which can accommodate different standpoints on these phenomena. Particular focus is placed on phenomena which can be identified from spatio-temporal data of the geographic domain, and therefore a discussion is given on the way the logical framework can be linked to data. Finally, we present a system prototype implemented to experiment the proposed logical framework with real data. © 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.