Temporal Relations of Intervals with a Gap

Max Egenhofer
14th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (Time 2007), Alicante, Spain
V. Goranko and X. S. Wang (eds.), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 169-174, June 2006.

Abstract

Forty-four relations are found between an interval and an interval with a gap (rIIg), capturing semantics that are distinct from those of the sets of constituting intervals and at a higher semantic level than pure point-based models. The relations' conceptual neighborhood graph evolves as a refinement of the graph of Allen's thirteen binary relations between intervals, primary due to more details revealed about five of the thirteen interval relations. The compositions of rIIg with their converse relations rIgI reveal that the interval compositions form an upper bound within which the gaps reduce the set of possible inferences, sometimes up to yielding unique inferences where interval compositions are fully undetermined.

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