Temporal Mediators: Supporting Uniform Accesses to Heterogeneous Temporal Information

In order to support uniform access to heterogeneous temporal information, we introduce the concept of a temporal mediator. A temporal mediator consists of three components: (i) a repository for windowing functions and conversion functions, (ii) a time granularity thesaurus and (iii) a query interpreter. There are two types of windowing functions: one associates each time point to a set of tuples, and the other associates each tuple to a set of time points. A conversion function transforms information in terms of one time granularity into that in terms of another time granularity. The time granularity thesaurus stores the knowledge about time granularities (e.g., names of time granularities and relationships among them). Users pose queries using the windowing functions and in terms of desired time granularities. (A query language, which can be used to form such queries, is given in the paper.) To answer such a user query, the query interpreter first employs the windowing functions together with the time granularity thesaurus to retrieve needed temporal data from the underlying databases and then uses the time granularity thesaurus to select suitable conversion functions which convert the responses to the desired time granularities. Thus, a temporal mediator provides a simple interface that supports uniform accesses to heterogeneous temporal databases.