A COHERENT ARCHITECTURE FOR A TEMPORAL OBJECT DATA-BASE MANAGEMENT-SYSTEM

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of practical general-purpo se data base management systems (DBMS) as ''state of the art'' technol ogy. In consequence, these systems are now widely used in a variety of application environments. However, many such systems were designed to capture current data, i.e., a snapshot of reality, but are insufficie nt for those applications in which past or future data are also requir ed. Even so, there has been little effort to design temporal DBMS, and currently there are no prominent commercial temporal DBMS. This artic le identifies, explores, and provides an approach to designing a coher ent architecture for a temporal object DBMS (TODBMS). It specifically involves the design, development, and implementation of TODBMS. We int roduce the basic features of our system and provide an overview of the functionalities supported. In addition, we identify the major compone nts of TODBMS and define the types of services each component should o ffer, as well as common abstractions and interfaces for these componen ts. Application environments include management and geographic informa tion systems, data base visualization, and robotics.