L'identité à travers l'espace et le temps. Vers une définition de l’identité et des relations spatio-temporelles entre objets géographiques.
PIERRE HALLOT | 26 mars 2012
Summary
The principal goal of this research is to model object’s evolution in space and time; it implies questioning identity, space and time. First, we define the concept of object spatio-temporal state. This concept allows modelling object identity evolution. Indeed, managing object identity must not be related to the object spatiality. In other words, we assume that the existence of an object is not dependant of its spatial extension. We show that there exist a lot of relationships associated to objects which does not yet exist or which does not exist anymore. We show also that when objects are not visible during an interval of time, it does not imply the lost of their identity. The model we propose aims at providing a framework for non-existent and non-visible objects Then, we study the spatio-temporal interactions between objects. The proposed solution is to define relationships between objects spatio-temporal states. It appears that the proposed set of relationships is a generalized vision of existing spatio-temporal reasoning models. Knowing that space-time continuity is not preserved in qualitative modelling, we apply the dominance theory which aims at retrieving continuous transitions between qualitative states. This development provides formal definitions of possible transition between spatio-temporal states relationships. Logically, the next step is to study the possible evolution of these spatio-temporal states relationships. This leads to the development of a formal model called “life and motion configurations”. This iconic representation gives a simplified view of the spatio-temporal evolution between two objects. It can be used to formalize the relationship between two spatio-temporal histories. In this work, we prove that this language is sufficient to provide spatio-temporal knowledge on moving objects. It determines also a framework in which others spatio-temporal reasoning models can be classified. Based on life and motion configurations, we propose two applications. Firstly, the life and motion configurations are generalised into a set of 25 relationships representing spatio-temporal information with a high level of abstraction. We believe that this set is close to people perception of spatio-temporal information. Secondly, two natural language interpretations of life and motion configurations are proposed; one applied to generalized spatio-temporal relationships, one applied to spatio-temporal predicates used in common French language.
