Visualising Rough Time Intervals in a Two-Dimensional Space

A lot of disciplines (e.g. archaeology) have to process imprecise temporal information. There are different possibilities to handle this kind of information, amongst them e.g. fuzzy set theory and rough set theory. In this paper, due to its capability in the context of many data acquisition applications, the focus has been set on rough set theory. To illustrate temporal information, an interval is often visualised by means of a one-dimensional segment in a onedimensional space. An alternative representation of time intervals is called the Triangular Model (TM) by which a time interval is represented by a point in a two-dimensional space. In this paper, rough set theory is applied into TM, which gets extended to the Rough Triangular Model (RTM). In RTM, Rough Time Intervals (RTI) and their mutual relations can be visualised diagrammatically, which offers opportunities to visualise and analyse imprecise temporal information. Aerial photos, taken during World War , containing imprecise temporal information with archaeological background, are used to illustrate the potentials of the model in processing RTI.