Experimenting Advanced Spatio-Temporal Formalisms: an Application to Behavioural Ecology

This paper presents an attempt of exploiting advanced database technologies for the representation and the analysis of animal behavior. In this context, formalisms such as MADS and MuTACLP have been proposed as approaches representing and handling spatio-temporal information. These formalisms are experimented here in a case study, provided by biologists, concerning the study of animal behaviour. This paper copes with the case study from three different points of view. First of all the conceptual model of the problem is provided, by using MADS. Then, a subset of the problem is represented in MuTACLP, a logical model able to formalise and solve the queries the biologists are interested in. Then we experiment the support of commercial GIS technology for the analysis of spatio-temporal data.