Abstract:

Qualitative relationship among temporal elements with the constraints of temporal granularity, is one of the most fundamental issues. The vector space is introduced to solve the complexity of the temporal relationship with the constraints of temporal granularity. Thus, the relationship between two temporal points can be converted to the operation in the vector space. Furthermore, the granularity scaling operators are used to analyze the relationship between different temporal elements, such as temporal point, temporal interval. The proposed method has a fundamental support to the temporal research and applications such as temporal database, temporal knowledge reasoning and temporal data mining.

Key words: temporal;granularity;temporal elements;qualitative relationship;constraint