Formal and conceptual modeling of spatio-temporal granularities

In the database research field the management of temporal and spatial information is crucial. Many information may be temporally and spatially qualified, i.e., data may be associated to temporal and spatial locations. In the management of qualified data, the notion of “granularity” plays an important role; it allows one to reason about temporal and spatial data expressed with different units of measure. By merging together notions of temporal and spatial granularity, in this work we present a formal framework for the representation and management of spatio-temporal granularities. This framework includes relationships and operations between granularities. Moreover, we propose a conceptual design allowing us to represent temporal, spatial, and spatio-temporal granularities in a relational database.