Querying Temporal Constraint Networks: A Unifying Approach

We develop the scheme of indefinite constraint databases using first-order logic as our representation language. When this scheme is instantiated with temporal constraints, the resulting formalism is more expressive than standard temporal constraint networks. The extra representational power allows us to express temporal knowledge and queries that have been impossible to express before. To make our claim more persuasive, we survey previous works on querying temporal constraint networks and show that they can be viewed as an instance of the scheme of indefinite constraint databases.

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