Time in Geographic Space: Report on the Specialist Meeting of Research Initiative 10

Max J. Egenhofer and Reginald G. Golledge
National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
Report 94-9


Abstract
This report describes the Specialist Meeting of the National Center for Geographic
Information and Analysis (NCGIA) Research Initiative on Spatio-Temporal Reasoning
in GIS. This Research Initiative addresses space and time as it relates to objects and
people in geographic space. The Specialist Meeting for the Research Initiative was held
at Lake Arrowhead, CA May 8-11, 1993 to set and prioritize a research agenda. This
meeting followed the workshop on Temporal Relations in Geographic Information
Systems held in Orono (January 1990) and a joint seminar with European researchers on
Methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in GIS held in San Miniato, Italy (September
1992), which served as a forum to assess the state-of-the-art in reasoning about
geographic space and time and started a dialog among different disciplines involved in
space-time reasoning. The focus of the Lake Arrowhead-workshop was on Time in
Geographic Space.                               
The primary goal of this report is to disseminate the results of the discussions and make
them available to other researchers. Discussions at the workshop focused on cognitive
and formalization issues as they relate to spatio-temporal reasoning. Participants
identified a research agenda consisting of three complementary parts:

studies of human cognitive representation, language, and culture with
         respect to geographic space and time;        

developments of formal systems for spatio-temporal reasoning; and

efforts to bridge the gap between human and formal systems with
         appropriate means for communication and interaction.

Workshop participants found over 60 researchable questions, which they categorized
according to this framework and subsequently prioritized. High priority was given to
research that increases our knowledge of cognitive spatial representations and how such
representations can be formalized. Also, the development of temporal taxonomies
recurred throughout the discussions. Several times the need for alternatives to the
snapshot space-time model were demanded, for instance by considering processes.
An edited book with revised and extended manuscripts of selected papers is in
preparation and scheduled to appear in early 1995.    

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