Author

Suzannah Hall

Date of Award

12-2004

Level of Access Assigned by Author

Open-Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Spatial Information Science and Engineering

Advisor

Kathleen Stewart Hornsby

Second Committee Member

Max J. Egenhofer

Third Committee Member

M. Kate Beard-Tisdale

Abstract

Events in the world do not occur in neat chronological order, but may take place, for example, during or overlapping each other, or as simultaneous events. Efficient summaries of real-world events are important in many disciplines and require events to be modeled in a linear fashion. This thesis focuses on modeling events as intervals and using relations between the events to derive linear orders from more complex partially ordered sets. A method is developed for mapping Allen's thirteen temporal relations to only two relations, before and equals, which allow a linear ordering of all events present in the set. This mapping requires additional constraints to preserve semantics of the original relations as the orders are generated. Depending on the relations present, several linear orders may be possible, and methods are discussed of filtering the possible orders so as to present only the most plausible orders to a user. The result is a methodology that allows plausible linear orders to be automatically generated from partially-ordered sets of events.

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