1. Event Structuring as a General Approach to Building Knowledge in Time-Based Collections

Many kinds of data collections are time-based or can be collected in a temporal manner. There has been a desire in the geography and geospatial communities to put temporal behavior on the same footing as spatial structure and to develop a comprehensive geo-temporal information system. In many cases, temporal information refers to sequences of happenings in the world. To efficiently represent such temporal information, we present event structuring as a general approach to build knowledge in time-based collections. In this case an event is defined as a meaningful occurrence that has substantial impact on subsequent developments. A properly organized event sequence forms a narrative, or story. Such stories are powerful mechanisms for human understanding; not only are they in a form that make them easier to recall, but they lead to mental models that can be intuited, examined, and joined together into larger models. In this paper, the pro-