Expressiveness of temporal query languages: on the modelling of intervals, interval relationships and states

Abstract Storing and retrieving time-related information are important, or even critical, tasks on many areas of Computer Science (CS) and in particular for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The expressive power of temporal databases/query languages has been studied from different perspectives, but the kind of temporal information they are able to store and retrieve is not always conveniently addressed. Here we assess a number of temporal query languages with respect to the modelling of time intervals, interval relationships and states, which can be thought of as the building blocks to represent and reason about a large and important class of historic information. To survey the facilities and issues which are particular to certain temporal query languages not only gives an idea about how useful they can be in particular contexts, but also gives an interesting insight in how these issues are, in many cases, ultimately inherent to the database paradigm. While in the area of AI declarative la...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: AIR
• Authors: Rodolfo Sabás Gómez, Juan Carlos Augusto
• Keywords: AIR 2006, Databases, Temporal Deductive Databases, Temporal Query