Event-oriented approaches to geographic phenomena

This paper is about the information-theoretic foundations upon which useful explanatory and predictive models of dynamic geographic phenomena can be based. It traces the development over the last decade or so of these foundations, from sequences of temporal snapshots, through object life histories, to event chronicles. A crucial ontological distinction is drawn between “things” and “happenings”, that is between continuant and occurrent entities. Most of the work up to now has focused on representing the evolution through time of geographic things, whether objects or fields. This paper argues that happenings should be upgraded to an equal status with things in dynamic geographic representations, and suggests ways of doing this. The main research focus of the paper is the application of an algebraic approach, previously developed mainly in the context of computational processes, to real-world happenings. It develops a pure process theory of space and time, and demonstrates its applicability by providing an example of the representation of motion of a vehicle through a region. The paper concludes by noting some of the requirements for scaling this approach to real-world dynamic scenarios, such as might be found, for example, in the automation of coordination of disaster relief.