Temporal Logic in the Context of Databases
Dov Gabbay, Ian Hodkinson · 1997
Abstract This chapter is about the handling of time, both in pure logic and in computing. It attempts to present a unified point of view, where computational and mathematical properties of the logic of time are interwoven in an intrinsic way. This is not difficult to do. Time is a very exciting subject. It is one of the only subjects on which everyone is an expert (the other three are the weather, food, and politics). We are moving through time continuously, and in order to survive and manage ourselves sensibly we constantly have to make temporal logic decisions. Philosophy since Aristotle has been trying to analyse the way we make these decisions. With the rise of computer science, where ideally one wants the machine to do the job for or of the human, there is a new urgency in the precise logical analysis of human temporal activity.