A Uniform Behavioral Temporal Object Model

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Ozsu, M. Tamer
  • Goralwalla, Iqbal
  • Szafron, Duane
  • Leontiev, Yuri

• Technical report TR95-13. In this work, we present a uniform behavioral temporal object model which includes a rich and extensible set of types and behaviors to support various notions of time. Our temporal model supports the continuous and discrete domains of time. It also supports various specifications of time, namely, time instants, time intervals and time spans. Two issues that frequently arise in real-world applications which deal with temporal information are the need to consistently store and operate on temporal information that is comprised of different granularities, and the ability to represent indeterminate temporal information. Temporal indeterminacy arises when we know for certain that an event did occur, but exactly when it occured is unknown. Our model provides a uniform framework that supports different granularities of time and temporal indeterminacy. We show how different granularities can be converted to each other, and how this leads to temporal indeterminacy. We further show how continuous and discrete indeterminate time intervals, spans and instants are consistently modeled in our framework. | TRID-ID TR95-13

• Date created

  1995

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Temporal databases
  • Incomplete information
  • Granularity
  • Object models
  • Temporal indeterminancy

• Type of Item

  Report

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3RX93H3T

• License

  Attribution 3.0 International