It is the contention of this paper that measurement frameworks serve as a guide to the assumptions involved. Temporal transformations can be handled as special forms of neighborhoods or special attribute rules. Neighborhoods can be defined rather flexibly, following the general scheme of Tomlin - moving from the purely local relationships inside one object through immediate neighbors to more complex relationships based on distance and other considerations. The rules of combination have not been considered as carefully in the GIS literature. A contributory rule uses all the values, giving each an opportunity to contribute to the composite result.
Addition is the most common contributory rule.
Finally, an interaction rule uses not just each value, but the pairwise combinations of values. This grouping of rules does not match the syntactic distinctions between unary and binary operators, but it emphasizes the relationships between input and output. Once the grid cell is imposed on the landscape, there is some kind of rule that takes all the possible attribute values and picks the value. These attribute rules are often part of tacit knowledge associated with the discipline responsible for the data source. Unlike the geometric component of GIS, the attribute rules cannot be determined without understanding the whole measurement operation.