NCGIA Research Initiative 10: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in
GIS
Funding Agency:
National Science Foundation (subcontract to U.C. Santa Barbara)
Initiative Co-Leaders:
Initiative Summary:
This initiative concentrates on geographic space, time, and
change related to bounded objects in geographic space. Its overall
goal is to increase our understanding of reasoning processes that
apply to geographic space and time. It builds on efforts of
behavioral geography, cognitive science, and environmental
psychology and we plan to expand them in a strongly computational
(i.e., formalized) framework. The initiative is interdisciplinary
bringing together scientists from many different areas such as
geography, computer science, engineering, behavioral science,
cognitive science, psychology, and application domains. The
objectives of this initiative are to:
- Study spatial applications to identify properties of different
time concepts such as continuous, discrete, monotonic, and
cyclic;
- Explore alternative mathematical formalizations to Cartesian
coordinates and Euclidean geometry, which represent spatial and
temporal reasoning processes better;
- Formalize human reasoning processes about geographic space and
time;
- Build computational frameworks, within which geographic
phenomena and processes, and their temporal changes, can be
simulated;
- Examine computational reasoning methods with observations from
human subject experiments about human spatial and temporal
perception and cognition.
Specialist Meeting
The NCGIA held a Specialist Meeting for this Research Initiative 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." Discussions at the workshop focused on cognitive
and formalization issues as they relate to spatio-temporal
reasoning.
The Research Agenda was published as Report 94-9 in the NCGIA's
Technical Report series.
Last updated on August 17, 1995.
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