A technical language is an important infra-structural component of any scientific community. To be effective, such a language should be well-defined, intuitive, and agreed-upon.
This document contains recommended definitions and names for a wide range of concepts specific to temporal databases that are well-defined, well understood, and widely used. The proposal meets a need for creating a higher degree of consensus on the definition and naming of central concepts from within the field. The use of inconsistent terminology adversely affects the accessibility of the literature—to members of the community as well as others—and has an adverse effect on progress.
The glossary includes discussions of the particular choices that were made. Thus, when several different names were previously used for a concept, the document not only states the chosen name, but it also presents the alternatives and discusses why the decision was made.
The history of this document may be described as follows. An initial glossary of temporal database concepts arose from e-mail discussions when appropriate terminology was considered for the book Temporal Databases: Theory, Design, and Implementation, edited by A. Tansel, J. Clifford, S. Gadia, S. Jajodia, A. Segev, and R. Snodgrass, Benjamin/Cummings Publishers. That glossary also appeared in the September 1992 issue of the ACM SIGMOD Record. The effort continued, independently of the book, and the community was invited to submit proposals to an open mailing list. As results, status documents appeared in December 1992 and in March 1993. In June 1993, a complete document of 100 glossary entries proposed to date was discussed among 40 temporal database researchers at the ``ARPA/NSF International Workshop on an Infrastructure for Temporal Databases,'' in Arlington, TX, with the goal of obtaining a widely agreed upon glossary. An editorial board has since supervised a revision of the glossary based on the input from the workshop. The result is the present glossary. Each individual who has contributed significantly to the glossary effort is a coauthor of this document.
The document is organized as follows. The next section first lists four relevance for concepts, then lists nine evaluation criteria for the naming of concepts. These criteria are referenced throughout the document. Finally, the structure of a glossary entry for a concept is explained. The next three sections constitute the main body of the glossary and contain glossary entries for concepts. The first includes entries for concepts that are expected to be of interest to researchers within the general database area. The second covers concepts that are expected to be of general interest within temporal databases only. The third covers the remaining concepts of more specialized interest. Finally, the affiliations and e-mail addresses of the authors are listed along with acknowledgements. Finally, an index is included on the last page.