Semantics and modeling of spatiotemporal changes

Abstract

Typical spatiotemporal information systems, such as traffic management and land management, need to trace the spatiotemporal changes of objects. Different applications have different requirements on describing spatiotemporal changes. It is necessary to make a systematic research on spatiotemporal changes in order to design a general spatiotemporal data model for different spatiotemporal applications. Based on the semantics of objects and spatiotemporal changes in the real world, this paper proposes a systematic classification on spatiotemporal changes of objects and a new approach to describe spatiotemporal changes, which is based on object identity and descriptor. The new approach uses object-level spatiotemporal changes and attribute-level spatiotemporal changes to describe the evolving history of objects. It overcomes the shortcomings of previous approaches, which are lacking in completeness and systematization on representing spatiotemporal changes, and can describe spatiotemporal changes completely. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.