Information Loss in Temporal Knowledge Representations

Abstract

The problem of memory overflow and the efficient storage and retrieval of temporal knowledge is discussed in this paper. For temporal systems, dealing with continuous streams of time-ordered data, the problem of freeing memory is an important one. For humans the problem is one of selective forgetting and reorganisation of memory. There are several approaches to temporal representations with model human mechanisms, e.g. Allen's interval calculus [1], where the mechanims for information loss are implicit in the relativistic nature of the representation itself or are treated as secondary to the representation