A Temporal Knowledge Representation Model OSAM*/T and Its Query Language OQL/T

Stanley Y. W. Su, Hsin-Hsing M. Chen
1991 Very Large Data Bases Conference  
The importance of temporal database management and temporal reasoning has long been recognized by the database and AI communities. Many techniques for modeling and managing temporal databases have been introduced. Most of the existing research on temporal databases have been based on the relational data model which has limited capabilities in modeling complex objects, constraints, and behavioral properties. In this paper, we present an object-oriented knowledge-based approach to model and
more » ... s temporal information. A temporal knowledge representation model OSAM*/T is described. It is an extension of the object-oriented semantic association model OSAM* to capture the concepts of time and history. Object time-stamping is used to record the evolutions of objects, and knowlcdgc rules instead of extra time notions are used to capture special temporal requirements. The temporal model is also featured by its separation of historical data and current data and its simple and maintainable representation of complex objects. In addition to the temporal data model, this paper also introduces a temporal query language OQL/T which is an extension of the object-oriented query language OQL for processing temporal information. Several temporal functions, interval comparison operators, and set operators are described.
dblp:conf/vldb/SuC91 fatcat:uuajrpo3v5d3nmfr3de7d7bgzu