ABSTRACT
This chapter frames a working construct—cartographic time—which is a scaled and generalized version of a more problematic phenomenon, time itself. It identifies a conception that treats the components of cartographic time most effectively, and to develop that view of time as a conceptual model for a temporal geographic information systems. Cartographic time will be considered as the fourth cartographic dimension. For good or ill, cartography traditionally describes space by the boundaries between its entities or attributes. Individual researchers can design models or representations of hypothesized space-time interactions to operate upon the absolute temporal and spatial coordinates stored in a cartographic representation. However, the space-time composite approach does suffer two unfortunate side-effects: the representation decomposes into progressively smaller objects, and the identifiers of changed objects must be altered retroactively. Among the assets of the topological model is that it accounts for all space within the database universe and thus facilitates error detection in spatial databases.
