Universal Temporal Extensions for Database Languages

Temporal reasoning and temporal query languages present di cult research problems of theoretical interest and practical importance. One problem is the chasm between point-based temporal reasoning and intervalbased reasoning. Another problem is the lack of robustness and universality in many proposed solutions, whereby temporal extensions designed for one language cannot be easily applied to other query languages| e.g., extensions proposed for SQL cannot be applied to QBE or Datalog. In this paper, we provide a simple solution to both problems by observing that all query languages support i single-value based reasoning and ii aggregate-based reasoning, and then showing that these two modalities can be naturally extended to support, respectively, point-based and interval-based temporal queries. We follow TSQL2 insofar as practical requirements are concerned, and show that its functionality can be captured by simpler constructs which can be applied uniformly to Datalog, QBE and SQL. Then...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Cindy Xinmin Chen, Carlo Zaniolo
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 1999, Interval-based Temporal Queries, Point-based Temporal Reasoning, Temporal Query Languages