Providing temporal support in data base management systems for global change research
Ke Qiu, Nabil I. Hachem, Matthew O. Ward, Michael A. Gennert · 1992
I. Introduction Time is essential in modeling the constantly changing world. However, conventional database systems represent the real world with only a tenseless snapshot--the current status. This is inadequate for those applications where time is an indispensable part of the information system, for example, medical information systems, sophisticated MIS tools, and information systems for global change research 27. In these systems, facts and data need to be interpreted in the context of time.