Space-Time Modeling

This article provides an overview of the development of space–time modeling in Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Distinguished from mathematical modeling of space and time, GIScience approach addresses conceptualization, representation, and database modeling of spatiotemporal constructs to support spatiotemporal query and analysis in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Much GIScience progress in spatiotemporal modeling parallels to the database development. However, the added complexity of geographic properties and structures present a wide range of challenges to properly and sufficiently conceptualize space and time in geographic worlds and how the conceptualization may be implemented in a GIS environment. The fundamental question of what constitutes a geographic object and how to recognize and handle the persistency of the same object is non-trivial in GIScience. The article discusses the conventional time-stamp approaches to space–time modeling of geographic information and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of time-stamped models. These time-stamped approaches employ concepts of valid time, transaction time, and user-defined time to roll-back to the previous states of a database or to support historical queries about geographic worlds. Furthermore, much research progress has been made to capture geographic events, processes, and dynamics in geographic domains. The article overviews these developments and suggests research directions of GIScience approaches in space–time modeling.