HANDLING INFINITE TEMPORAL DATA

In this paper, we present a powerful framework for describing, storing, and reasoning about infinite temporal information. This framework is an extension of classical relational databases. It represents infinite temporal information by generalized tuples defined by linear repeating points and constraints on these points. We characterize the expressiveness of these generalized relations in terms of predicates definable in Presburger arithmetic. Next, we prove that relations formed from generalized tuples are closed under the operations of relational algebra and provide complexity results for the evaluation of first-order queries. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.