Event‐oriented approaches to geographic phenomena

This paper is about the information‐theoretic foundations upon which useful explanatory and predictive models of dynamic geographic phenomena can be based. It traces the development of these foundations, from sequences of temporal snapshots, through object life histories, to event chronicles. A crucial ontological distinction is drawn between ‘things’ and ‘happenings’, that is between continuant and occurrent entities. Up to now, most research has focused on representing the evolution through time of geographic things, whether objects or fields. This paper argues that ‘happenings’ should be upgraded to an equal status with ‘things’ in dynamic geographic representations and suggests ways of doing this. The main research focus of the paper is the application of an algebraic approach, previously developed mainly in the context of computational processes, to real‐world happenings. It develops a pure event‐oriented theory of space and time, and suggests the possibilities that the theory provides by using it to represent the motion of a vehicle through a region. The paper contains a discussion of the scalability and applicability of this model to geographic domains and illustrates some of the ideas by reference to a geo‐sensor example. The paper concludes by summarizing its main ideas, relating the research to other germane areas not covered in the developmental survey, and indicating directions for future work.