A Framework for the Description of Spatiotemporal Relationships

Spatiotemporal data model, which is the basis of spatiotemporal information management, deals with the representation and manipulation of spatiotemporal data. So far many spatiotemporal data models have been proposed, but most of them concentrated on the representation of spatiotemporal objects and few of them make systematic studies on spatiotemporal relationships. Based on the semantics of spatiotemporal changes, this paper first proposes a systematic classification on spatiotemporal relationships. And then a framework for the representation of different types of spatiotemporal relationships is presented. We classify spatiotemporal relationships into two categories, which are static spatiotemporal relationships and dynamic spatiotemporal relationships. The latter is further divided into two types: time-varying topology and history topology. The definition and representation of these spatiotemporal relationships are discussed in detail. Through the research on spatiotemporal relationships, we can further develop a more functional spatiotemporal data model that support both spatiotemporal objects and spatiotemporal relationships.