ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature of spatiotemporality in the context of the six geographic information systems (GIS) functions. The six GIS functions are inventory, analysis, updates, quality control, scheduling, and display. For inventory, most research has focused on the admittedly difficult problems of spatial and temporal databases in isolation. An important and highly spatial form of analysis operates on a categorical coverage, which measures attributes that exhaustively cover a region. Incremental update methods now exist for atemporal GIS that are equally well suited to temporal GIS. The role of quality control is to prevent errors from entering the database. A scheduling capability permits a database to predicate its actions upon predefined threshold states. GISs communicate their results via maps and tables, developing temporal display formats is critical; because spatiotemporal data breach Sinton’s framework, designing displays is not straightforward.
