Qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints and relational databases: Theory, architecture, and applications

Many different applications in different areas need to deal with both: 1) d atabases. in order to take into account large amounts of structured data, a nd 2) quantitative and qualitative temporal constraints about such data. in this paper, we propose an approach that extends: 1) temporal databases, an d 2) artificial intelligence temporal reasoning techniques and integrate th em in order to face such a need. Regarding temporal reasoning, we consider some results that we proved recently about efficient query answering in the Simple Temporal Problem framework and we extend them in order to deal with partitioned sets of constraints and to support relational database operati ons. Regarding databases, we extend the relational model in order to consid er also qualitative and quantitative temporal constraints both in the data (data expressiveness) and in the queries (query expressiveness). We then pr opose a modular architecture integrating a relational database with a tempo ral reasoner. We also consider classes of applications that fit into our ap proach and consider patient management in a hospital as an example.