Handling Temporal Grouping and Pattern-Matching Queries in a Temporal Object Model

This paper presents a language for expressing temporal pattern-matching queries, and a set of temporal grouping operators for structuring histories following calendar-based criteria. Pattern-matching queries are shown to be useful for reasoning about successive events in time while tempo-ral grouping may be either used to aggregate data along the time dimension or to display histories. The combination of these capabilities allows to express complex queries involv-ing succession in time and calendar-based conditions simul-taneously. These operators are embedded into the TEMPOS temporal data model and their use is illustrated through ex-amples taken from a geographical application. The proposal has been validated by a prototype on top of the O2 DBMS