Abstract

Reasoning about events or temporal aspects is fundamental for modeling geographic phenomena. This work concerns the analysis of events as configurations of temporal intervals. It presents two strategies to select relations that characterize configurations of temporal intervals: a strategy based on the algebraic property of composition and a strategy based on a neighboring concept in a vector representation. This type of analysis is useful for characterizing sets of events without the need of making an exhaustive specification of all temporal relations. This work complements a previous study about topological relations of regions in a 2D space and confirms the potential of using the algebraic properties of composition and the metric characteristics of intervals, even if only qualitative relations are considered. © Springer-Verlag; 2004 References.