Object-oriented Temporal Database Systems Research And Development

Time is an important aspect of all real-world phenomena. Events occur atspecific points in times. The objects and the relationships among objects exist overtime. The ability to model this temporal dimension of the real world is essential tomany computer applications, such as accounting, geographical information systems,inventory control and decision support system, etc.A temporal database is defined as a database which facilitates the storage of past,present and future data. This is in contrast to a traditional database which can storedata that is valid for only an instant in time, hence the term snapshot database.Most research on the implementation issues of temporal databases hasconcentrated on extending the relational data model to encompass the dimension oftime. However, these temporal models have many problems interacting with theapplications, thus a relatively new temporal database model, object oriented temporaldatabase model has been a hot spot for researchers.We extended the original O2 object-oriented database model to encompass thetime management ability. A new object-oriented temporal database model: TO2model is then proposed. To support temporal information management, we firstanalyzed each component of an object: attribute, relationship, constraint, method,event etc. Then we proposed a new model to encompass temporal dimensionalsupport for each aspect of an object, thus the temporal information of an object canbe managed in our model. We also designed the architecture and framework of theTO2 system, especially to meet the requirement of some application domains whichneed massive temporal data management, such as intelligent control system,geographical information system etc. We also implemented a prototype of TO2system. Some features such as multi thread, file list were introduced to provided highefficiency data floW low data storage cost. These features made TO2 a robusttemporaI data management system fOr massive temporal data.