Coping with Events in Temporal Relational Databases

Abstract

Event relations are used in many temporal relational database approaches to represent facts occurring at time instants. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of such approaches fully copes with the definition of events as provided, e.g., by the “consensus” temporal database glossary. We propose a new approach which overcomes such a limitation, allowing one to cope with multiple events occurring in the same temporal granule. This move involves major extensions to current approaches, since indeterminacy about the time and number of occurrences of events need to be faced. Specifically, we have introduced a new data model, and new definitions of relational algebraic operators coping with the above issues, and we have studied their reducibility. Last, but not least, we have shown that our approach can be easily extended in order to cope with a general form of temporal indeterminacy. Such an extension further increases the applicability of our approach.