Modeling and Management of Temporal Data in Object-Oriented Knowledge Bases

There has been a considerable amount of work on object-oriented databases, active databases, and deductive databases. The common objective of these efforts is to produce highly intelligent and active systems for supporting the next generation of database applications. These future systems must be capable of capturing the concepts of time and managing not just temporal data but temporal knowledge expressed by knowledge rules. In this paper, we describe our efforts on a temporal object-oriented knowledge model, OSAM*/T, its associated temporal query language, OQL/T, an underlying temporal algebra, TA-algebra, and some implementation techniques. In addition to the features of the traditional object-oriented paradigm, the model is characterized by its strong support of association types and its incorporation of temporal knowledge rules for specifying temporal and other types of semantic constraints associated with object classes and their temporal object instances. The query language is featured by its pattern-based specification of temporal object associations, which allows complex queries with various time constraints to be formulated in a relatively simple way. The temporal algebra provides a set of primitive operators for manipulating homogeneous and/or heterogeneous patterns of temporal object associations, thus providing the needed mathematical foundation for processing and optimizing temporal queries. The implementation techniques include a Delta-Instance and Multi-Snapshot Storage Model, as well as data partitioning and clustering schemes for storage management of temporal knowledge bases.