A Formal Model for the TIMESPACE Software

Abstract

This paper proposes a formal model to underpin the development of the TIMESPACE software. This software can be used to produce very useful statistics regarding the use of rooms in houses. The statistics can be utilized for research related to the social aspects of life associated with the houses and the time people spend in the various rooms for various activities. This paper is therefore concerned with the storage and retrieval of time-related architectural spatial information. The proposed model caters for the representation of time in data structures, which are used to store data regarding architectural spaces. The representation of time is achieved through the extension of these structures with lifespans. The introduction of lifespans into data structures representing spaces and users of spaces will allow us to manipulate the stored data and produce very useful information related to the time and use of spaces. Few examples of possible questions/queries that we will be able to answer are: which space is used the most/least, which users use a space during a particular time, which spaces are used by different users at the same time, etc. In order to produce such information from the data structures, we need to define some operators on lifespans. Such operators can then be used either within a query language allowing ad-hoc or predefined queries, or within a programming language for predefined queries. In this paper we formally define these operators and provide their pseudo-code specifications. We also provide some pseudo-code specifications of possible queries to illustrate the use and usefulness of these operators.