Definition
The terms ‘process’ and ‘event’ both refer to things that happen or go on in time, and are invariably associated with some kind of change. The terms are often used loosely, sometimes interchangeably, and there is little consensus on how they should be defined or distinguished from one another. The following definitions are suggested to bring the terms into line with their main everyday uses while providing a useful basis for technical discussions.
Process:An ongoing dynamic situation involving the activity of one or more material things or portions of matter. Key properties of processes are that (1) they are conceptualized as homogeneous, i.e., if a process is going on over some interval of time then it is also going on over all the subintervals of that interval (at least down to some minimal length associated with the inherent ‘grain-size’ of the process), and (2) they are open-ended, i.e., if a process is going on at a particular time then in principle it can continue...
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Recommended Reading
Hornsby K, Worboys M (eds) (2004) Event-oriented approaches in geographic information science. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahway. Special issue of: Spatial cognition and computation, vol 4, number 1
Peuquet DJ, Duan N (1995) An event-based spatiotemporal data model (ESTDM) for temporal analysis of geographical data. Int J Geogr Inf Syst 9: 7–24
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Galton, A. (2017). Processes and Events. In: Shekhar, S., Xiong, H., Zhou, X. (eds) Encyclopedia of GIS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_1032
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17885-1_1032
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