Representing Geographic Information to Support Queries about Life and Motion of Socio-Economic Units
May Yuan · 2000
This chapter proposes a dynamic GIS representation for the support of spatio-temporal information retrieval and analysis. Hitherto, GIS representations have been mostly developed upon layer concepts with map metaphors, which fundamentally depict 2-D static geographic worlds with spatial components as the focal objects, semantic components as attributes of spatial objects, and temporal components as time stamps (Frank and Mark, 1991). Consequently, spatio-temporal information about life (birth, death, growth, merge, split, and reincarnation) and motion (movement, spread, jump, and flow) (Frank, this volume) is difficult to represent in a GIS. This is because information about life and motion requires the separation of semantic and temporal components from spatial components to allow description of geographic information from any perspective of semantics, time, or space.