Conceptual Neighborhood Graphs of Discrete Time Intervals

Temporal reasoning is an important part of the field of time geography. Recent advances in qualitative temporal reasoning have developed a set of 74 relations that apply between discretized time intervals. While the identification of specific relations is important, the field of qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning relies on conceptual neighborhood graphs to address relational similarity. This similarity is paramount for generating essential decision support structures, notably reasonable aggregations of concepts into single terms and the determination of nearest neighbor queries. In this paper, conceptual neighborhoods graphs of qualitative topological changes in the form of translation, isotropic scaling, and anisotropic scaling are identified using a simulation protocol. The outputs of this protocol are compared to the extant literature regarding conceptual neighborhood graphs of the Allen interval algebra, demonstrating the theoretical accuracy of the work. This work supports the development of robust spatio-temporal artificial intelligence as well as the future development of spatio-temporal query systems upon the spatio-temporal stack data architecture.