TY - JOUR
T1 - Symbolic user-defined periodicity in temporal relational databases
AU - Terenziani, Paolo
PY - 2003/3
Y1 - 2003/3
N2 - Calendars and periodicity play a fundamental role in many applications. Recently, some commercial databases started to support user-defined periodicity in the queries in order to provide "a human-friendly way of handling time" (see, e.g., TimeSeries in Oracle 8). On the other hand, only few relational data models support user-defined periodicity in the data, mostly using "mathematical" expressions to represent periodicity. In this paper, we propose a high-level "symbolic" language for representing user-defined periodicity which seems to us more human-oriented than mathematical ones, and we use the domain of Gadia's temporal elements in order to define its properties and its extensional semantics. We then propose a temporal relational model which supports user-defined "symbolic" periodicity (e.g., to express "on the second Monday of each month") in the validity time of tuples and also copes with frame times (e.g., "from 1/1/98 to 28/2/98"). We define the temporal counterpart of the standard operators of the relational algebra, and we introduce new temporal operators and functions. We also prove that our temporal algebra is a consistent extension of the classical (atemporal) one. Moreover, we define both a fully symbolic evaluation method for the operators on the periodicities in the validity times of tuples, which is correct but not complete, and semisymbolic one, which is correct and complete, and study their computational complexity.
AB - Calendars and periodicity play a fundamental role in many applications. Recently, some commercial databases started to support user-defined periodicity in the queries in order to provide "a human-friendly way of handling time" (see, e.g., TimeSeries in Oracle 8). On the other hand, only few relational data models support user-defined periodicity in the data, mostly using "mathematical" expressions to represent periodicity. In this paper, we propose a high-level "symbolic" language for representing user-defined periodicity which seems to us more human-oriented than mathematical ones, and we use the domain of Gadia's temporal elements in order to define its properties and its extensional semantics. We then propose a temporal relational model which supports user-defined "symbolic" periodicity (e.g., to express "on the second Monday of each month") in the validity time of tuples and also copes with frame times (e.g., "from 1/1/98 to 28/2/98"). We define the temporal counterpart of the standard operators of the relational algebra, and we introduce new temporal operators and functions. We also prove that our temporal algebra is a consistent extension of the classical (atemporal) one. Moreover, we define both a fully symbolic evaluation method for the operators on the periodicities in the validity times of tuples, which is correct but not complete, and semisymbolic one, which is correct and complete, and study their computational complexity.
KW - High-level "symbolic" language
KW - Semisymbolic evaluation method
KW - Symbolic (intensional) evaluation method
KW - Temporal relational model and algebra
KW - User-defined symbolic periodicity in the validity time
KW - User-friendly treatment of periodicity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0037341567&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TKDE.2003.1185847
DO - 10.1109/TKDE.2003.1185847
M3 - Article
SN - 1041-4347
VL - 15
SP - 489
EP - 509
JO - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
JF - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
IS - 2
ER -