Edited by Max J. Egenhofer and Reginald G. Golledge, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
NCGIA Technical Report 94-9
Copyright
(c) National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis
November 1994
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:
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.
The initiative co-leaders want to thank everyone who contributed to the success of the workshop. The Steering Committee (Helen Couclelis, Andrew Frank, Stephen Hirtle, Gail Langran, David Mark, Daniel Montello, and Michael Worboys) provided invaluable input for the agenda and schedule of the Specialist Meeting. The participants' active contributions during the discussions at the Specialist Meeting made this Research Agenda possible. We appreciated the leadership provided by the discussants in the plenary sessions and the chairs of the small-group discussions. None of the participants should be singled out, though Barbara Tversky and John Kelmelis deserve special credit for defining the framework within which the researchable questions were organized and prioritized. Local arrangements at Lake Arrowhead were provided by Judith Parker. Scott Bell, Tom Cova, Mei-Po Kwan, and Jayant Sharma assisted during the meeting with note taking and recording of the sessions. Kathleen Hornsby, Karen Harp, Sandi Glendinning, and Blane Shaw supported the initiative co-leaders with administrative tasks during the preparation of the meeting. Thanks to everyone!
Special thanks go to Scott Freundschuh and Jayant Sharma, who worked from the notes taken and the tapes recorded during the meeting, and distilled the essence of the discussions. Scott also communicated with the participants in the aftermath of the Specialist Meeting, when individual researchable questions were categorized and prioritized.
This report is part of the Research Initiative 10, "Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in GIS" of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number SBR-88-10917. This support by NSF is gratefully acknowledged.