The expressive power of temporal relational query languages

Abstract

The authors consider the representation of temporal data based on tuple and attribute timestamping. They identify the requirements in modeling temporal data and elaborate on their implications in the expressive power of temporal query languages. They introduce a temporal relational data model where N1NF relations and attribute timestamping are used and one level of nesting is allowed. For this model, a nested relational tuple calculus (NTC) is defined. They follow a comparative approach in evaluating the expressive power of temporal query languages, using NTC as a metric and comparing it with the existing temporal query languages. They prove that NTC subsumes the expressive power of these query languages. They also demonstrate how various temporal relational models can be obtained from the temporal relations by NTC and give equivalent NTC expressions for their languages. Furthermore, they show the equivalence of intervals and temporal elements (sets) as timestamps in their model.