Capturing spatiotemporal semantics for database design and information integration

Summary form only given. The objective of this research is to develop a spatiotemporal semantic model that can be used for conceptual database design and information integration of geospatial datasets. The authors´ research methodology includes developing a theoretical framework, demonstrating the practicality of the framework using prototypes and evaluating the framework using a case study and an experiment. The authors define an annotation-based approach, a generic methodology that can be applied to any conventional semantic model to translate it into a spatiotemporal semantic model. The authors have applied their annotation-based approach to the unifying semantic model (USM), a conventional conceptual model to propose the spatiotemporal-unifying semantic model (ST-USM). They have defined the annotation syntax in Backus Naur form (BNF) and have formally defined spatiotemporal semantics using first order logic. Using ST-USM, they are developing a database design tool that, helps define a straightforward to use comprehensive methodology to capture spatiotemporal semantics for database applications