Enhancing GISs for spatio-temporal reasoning

We present a system which provides geographical information systems (GISs) with enhanced capabilities for supporting spatio-temporal reasoning. On top of a commercial GIS we build a software layer supplying the user with a declarative spatio-temporal interaction with the underlying GIS. Declarative spatio-temporal reasoning is supported by the language MuTACLP, a constraint logic based knowledge representation language that offers facilities for modeling and handling spatio-temporal information, enriched with some basic operators for combining different spatio-temporal knowledge bases. We describe the architecture of the system and we illustrate an actual implementation. The underlying GIS is ArcGIS 8.1, the language MuTACLP is implemented in Sicstus Prolog and the GIS interface establishing the connection between ArcGIS 8.1 and MuTACLP is realized in Visual Basic. Finally, we highlight the usefulness of this approach by modeling a case study regarding the behavioral ecology of crested porcupines.