[tz] data uncertainty

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Tue Sep 10 18:05:29 UTC 2013


Thanks for that note.  These are deepish waters, and you
might be interested in recent research on how to represent
partial temporal knowledge, often motivated by
practical data-mining problems.  One place to start
would be Ligozat's book Qualitative Spatial
and Temporal Reasoning (2012), Wiley-ISTE, ISBN
978-1-84821-252-7.

As an aside I should mention that I'm not a fan of interval
arithmetic; if done carefully it typically results in
intervals so large as to be meaningless, and if done
sloppily what's the point?  Admittedly I am biased here
as Stott Parker and I wrote a paper
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.637>
based on random rounding, a quite-different approach
that doesn't require a new programming language.

Of course we're way off the deep end here, in
terms of any practical change I'd propose for
the tz code or data.  Still, it's often helpful to
stay in shouting range of the researchers.


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