From: Antony Galton (A.P.Galton@exeter.ac.uk)
Date: 03/10/03
Jerry, A number of people working on space and time, particularly in reference to geographical processes, have advocated a four-dimensional ontology based on space-time chunks. I think there may be something to be said for this approach in some situations, particular when modelling complex phenomena that simultaneously manifest both object-like and process-like aspects, depending on how they are viewed (e.g., a hurricane can be tracked like a moving object in satellite images, but from the point of view of someone on the ground, in its path, it's more like an event - so it might be useful to have an underlying representation from which both these cases arise as different projection, as it were). In order to take this view of the phenomena, one presumably also needs an integrated 4D ontology of spatio-temporal locations - so alongside your two lists for Space and Time, there could be a third list, for Space-Time. (Some enthusiasts for this point of view would say that the third list should *replace* the first two, but more conservatively we might at least want it co-existing with them - though of course that also implies that we need to sort out the relationships between elements in the Space-Time list and corresponding elements in the other two lists ...) Anyway, just a thought. And more generally, I'm definitely interested in these issues and would therefore like to remain on the mailing list. Yours Antony ------------------------------------------ Antony Galton School of Engineering and Computer Science University of Exeter
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