Qualitative temporal representation and reasoning about points, intervals and durations

An elegant framework called INDU (Pujari et al., Proc. Australian Conf. AI, 1999) has been proposed for representing qualitative information about time intervals and durations. INDU is a single network, therefore it avoids typical problems of bi-networks, and in addition it has interesting computational properties. We extend INDU in two directions: we enrich its expressive power introducing points and maintaining the same computational properties, and we provide it with an axiomatic theory able to handle qualitative temporal information about points, intervals and durations in a unified framework. This theory is based on general interval entities and two relations: "general meets" and "not longer than".