TIME AND TIME AGAIN - THE MANY WAYS TO REPRESENT TIME

One of the most crucial problems in any computer system that involves representing the world is the representation of time. This includes applications such as databases, simulation, expert systems, and applications of Artificial Intelligence in general. In this brief article, I will give a survey of the basic techniques available for representing time, and then talk about temporal reasoning in a general setting as needed in AI applications. Quite different representations of time are usable depending on the assumptions that can be made about the temporal information to be represented. The most crucial issue is the degree of certainty one can assume. Can one assume that a timestamp can be assigned to each event, or barring that, that the events are fully ordered? Or can we only assume that a partial ordering of events is known? Can events be simultaneous? Can they overlap in time and yet not be simultaneous? If they are not instaneous, do we know the durations of events? Different answers to each of these questions allow very different representations of time.