Lifestyles - A Paradigm for the Description of Spatiotemporal Databases
Damir Medak · reposiTUm (TU Wien) · 1999
This gives an idea of how difficult a strict decision about temporal continuity in the real world may be.Indeed, the answers depend on the circumstances one asks.We do not attempt to solve all dilemmas concerning the old puzzle.We are concerned with representations of the real world for constructing information systems, which can track change in identity of objects.We perceive the real world as a collection of distinguishable entities that have properties and are mutually connected by relations.For example, pieces of furniture in a room are entities, having color and weight as properties, and there is at least a simple spatial relation between the furniture and the room: the furniture is in the room.We are able to individuate all entities in the observed Recently, Frank argued that the major impediment to broader usage of modern GIS is the lack of tools dealing with temporal information and processes in general (Frank 1998b).Capabilities to manage temporal information are necessary for decision-making support in answering essential political questions.The conceptual models underlying modern GIS seem inherently incapable of dealing with dynamic information. HypothesisMany GIS applications enforce an 'object' view: features in the world are represented as objects with well-defined boundaries (Frank 1996).The real world is simplified to the representation of selected objects being important for a given context -a universe of