Propagating Temporal Relations of Intervals by Matrix

Traditional temporal relations propagating is based on Allen’ s Interval Algebra. This paper proposes an alternative method to propagate temporal relations among intervals, in which 5£ 5 matrices are used to represent temporal relations of intervals. Hence, the propagation of temporal relations is transformed into a numerical computation. For ef® ciency, we use the special values of the thirteen matrices to determine the possible temporal relations between two given intervals by using only the ® nal resultant matrix so as to optimize the propagation. To evaluate the utility of the proposed technique, we have implemented the matrix representation in Java. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach is ef® cient and promising.