Web services for time granularity reasoning

We first briefly illustrate the concept of time granularity and review the emerging approaches for modeling and reasoning with it. We then advocate the need for a set of Web services that distributed applications can use to define and manipulate time granularities. As an example of these services, we discuss in detail the GSTP service, a constraint solver for networks of temporal constraints with time granularities, developed at the University of Milan, and based on recently published theoretical results. The GSTP service can be accessed from applications through the Internet as a Web service, or can be accessed by a human user through a sophisticated Java interface. A system demonstration was given during the talk.