The role of geographic visualisation and knowledge discovery in spatio-temporal data modelling
Mónica Wachowicz · Socio-Environmental Systems Modeling · 2000
One of the most common findings in literature is that time is just one more dimension to be added to the spatial dimension. This perspective is indeed the underlying rationale behind most of the implementations of spatial and temporal data models using relational or object-oriented database architectures. However, the synergy of space and time requires concepts that represent spacetime dynamics (for example, moving objects and change) and the human cognition of a knowledge domain (for example, distinction between observed spatio-temporal data and derived knowledge). The join between space and time dimensions is inadequate for representing space and time in database models. Mainly because this will result in a database model that represents the spatial dimension in the same manner as the time dimension, and as a result, it may only capture time-referenced sequences (snapshots) of spatial data.