Interval algebra for spatio-temporal composition of distributed multimedia objects

Relations among temporal intervals can be used to model time dependent objects. The extension of temporal relation results in many researches related to the spatio-temporal modeling of distributed objects. We propose a fast mechanism for temporal relation compositions. A temporal transitive closure table is derived, and an interval-based temporal relation algebraic system is constructed. Thus, we propagate the time constraints of arbitrary two objects across long distances n by linear time. A set of algorithms is proposed to derive reasonable relations between intervals. Possible conflicts in the user specification are detected and eliminated. The algorithms are extended for time-based media in an arbitrary n-dimensional space. The contributions of these algorithms and the interval algebra system can be used to detect and eliminate time conflicts, to generate the schedule and layout of multimedia presentations, to model interval-based synchronization specifications, to analyze the distributed real-time playout, to denote the semantics of natural language sentence tense, and to capture the temporal semantics among distributed multimedia objects.