A Semantic Framework for Spatiotemporal Data Representation

Spatiotemporal databases have received much attention since more and more applications, such as environment management and land management, have shown urgent requirements on the management of spatiotemporal information. But different applications have different requirements on describing spatiotemporal objects and spatiotemporal changes, and there is no systematic foundation for the modeling of spatiotemporal data. In this paper, we first study the characteristics of spatiotemporal changes. And then we build a semantic framework for the representation of spatiotemporal data. Spatiotemporal changes are classified into six types. We use three elements to represent these spatiotemporal changes, which are called lifecycle, descriptor and transformation. Through the three elements, a fundamental framework to model spatiotemporal data is achieved.