Abstract:Temporal span is an important and special temporal primitive in the temporal applications. On the one hand, the semantic of temporal span is often uncertain in different temporal context. On the other hand, the flexible representation of temporal span is tend to be non-normative, which results in the difficulty to handle the order relationship of temporal spans and affects the accuracy of the temporal calculation in the temporal applications. The binding conception is introduced to address these inherent issues of temporal spans. Firstly, the order relationship of temporal spans is discussed. The reasons why the uncertain relationship exists between two non-canonical temporal spans are analyzed, revealing the necessity of temporal span binding. Secondly, the affine space is explored for mapping temporal spans into the affine space. The temporal binding is constructed by the affine transformations. Therefore, the binding of temporal span with temporal point, continuous temporal interval and discontinuous temporal interval is elaborated respectively, and the operations of the temporal primitives are implemented.