Qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints and relational databases: theory, architecture, and applications

• Published in: IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering Vol. 11; no. 6; pp. 948 - 968
• Main Authors: Brusoni, V., Console, L., Terenziani, P., Pernici, B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.1999
• Subjects: Architecture; Artificial intelligence; Constraint theory; Deductive databases; Event detection; Expert systems; Hospitals; Intelligent structures; Management information systems; Query processing; Reasoning; Relational data bases; Relational databases; Temporal logic
• ISSN: 1041-4347; 1558-2191
• DOI: 10.1109/69.824613

Many different applications in different areas need to deal with both: databases, in order to take into account large amounts of structured data; and quantitative and qualitative temporal constraints about such data. We propose an approach that extends: temporal databases and artificial intelligence temporal reasoning techniques and integrate them in order to face such a need. Regarding temporal reasoning, we consider some results that we proved recently about efficient query answering in the Simple Temporal Problem framework and we extend them in order to deal with partitioned sets of constraints and to support relational database operations. Regarding databases, we extend the relational model in order to consider also qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints both in the data (data expressiveness) and in the queries (query expressiveness). We then propose a modular architecture integrating a relational database with a temporal reasoner. We also consider classes of applications that fit into our approach and consider patient management in a hospital as an example.