Basic Notions and Rationale of the Handling of Imperfect Information in Spatio-Temporal Databases

Abstract

Space and time, both are familiar notions, although they strangely do not let capture themselves in strict definitions. Everything people do, is experienced in space and time. Space and time are, therefore, the logical prerequisites of all human experience. As such they are used as a framework for querying and reasoning. The perspectives in this book are limited to querying and reasoning about information kept in databases and that carries time and space aspects. The underlying time and space models themselves are only presented in as far as they are needed for that purpose. In the same way as models able to deal with imprecision and uncertainty can be conceived, these notions can find their way in the querying and reasoning formalisms too, whether applied to traditional database models or to the more sophisticated database models.