Towards an infrastructure for temporal databases

Abstract

s 35 References 47 Workshop Call for Position Papers 54 List of Figures 1 Interaction of Conceptual and Representational Data Models : : : : : : : : : : : : 14 iii 1 Introduction Temporal databases has been an active area of research for the last fifteen years, with a corpus nearing 700 papers [KLINE93]. Most database conferences include at least one paper on temporal databases (TDB). Temporal databases are now discussed in several undergraduate database textbooks. There are perhaps one hundred researchers actively studying temporal databases. During that time an astonishing diversity of temporal data models and query languages has arisen. Most applications, whether business, engineering, medical, or scientific, need to store historical data. Surprisingly, in spite of both this substantial activity and this pressing requirements from the user community, there are no widely used commercial temporal database management systems (TDBMS). One view is that there is an embarrassment of ri...