New SBIR Award
Posted: Wed January 23, 2008 2:02 pm by Melissa Scott Brown
In cooperation with Impact Computing, CSA recently received a small business research initiative (SBIR) phase I award from the Army Corp of Engineers. The project aims to develop a new spatiotemporal data model capable of representing and analyzing transition, mutation, and movement.
Data models are at the heart of any information system, with the data model serving as the infrastructure that ultimately determines what meaningful information can be distilled from the data. Though conventional Geographic Information System (GIS) data models have been extended to support some of today’s more advanced spatio-temporal queries and capabilities, a fundamental shift in our conceptualization and representation of spatio-temporal dynamics is necessary in order to truly harness and exploit the informational power of these datasets.
Our Phase 1 research emphasizes the need to represent geographic dynamics in spatio-temporal data models. Conventionally, GIS databases incorporate the temporal dimension as attributes of spatial data elements, or through time-stamping of individual data layers, records or values. This constraining of time to spatial data layers or elements is self-limiting in that it is fundamentally incapable of representing movement, mutation, deformation (or any other spatio-temporal behavior that involves changes to location, geometry, size, topology, and aggregated spatial characteristics), especially when these changes transcend or transform the constraints or nature of the spatial elements to which they relate.
Extending beyond the conventional treatment of space and time in GIS databases, our Phase 1 research takes a new direction to tackle the aforementioned challenges. Our premise is that spatio-temporal data are samples of geographic dynamics and that understanding the drivers and outcomes of these geographic dynamics is the ultimate goal of a spatio-temporal GIS. Hence, an expressive spatio-temporal GIS must be able to represent these paradigms and relationships. While there are no unified definitions of spatio-temporal dynamics in literature, we consider its drivers to include activities, processes, and events, and its outcomes to primarily consist of change, movement and mutation (i.e., integration, fragmentation, dispersion, contraction, intensification, diminution, etc.).