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Article
Efficiently Supporting Temporal Granularities
IEEE transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering (2000)
  • Curtis Dyreson, Utah State University
  • William Evans
  • Hong Lin
  • Richard Snodgrass
Abstract

Granularity is an integral feature of temporal data. For instance, a person's age is commonly given to the granularity of years and the time of their next airline flight to the granularity of minutes. A granularity creates a discrete image, in terms of granules, of a (possibly continuous) time-line. We present a formal model for granularity in temporal operations that is integrated with temporal indeterminacy, or “don't know when” information. We also minimally extend the syntax and semantics of SQL-92 to support mixed granularities. This support rests on two operations, scale and cast, that move times between granularities, e.g., from days to months. We demonstrate that our solution is practical by showing how granularities can be specified in a modular fashion, and by outlining a time- and space-efficient implementation. The implementation uses several optimization strategies to mitigate the expense of accommodating multiple granularities

Keywords
  • efficiently,
  • support,
  • supporting,
  • granularities,
  • temporal,
  • efficient
Disciplines
Publication Date
July, 2000
Citation Information
Curtis Dyreson, William Evans, Hong Lin and Richard Snodgrass. "Efficiently Supporting Temporal Granularities" IEEE transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering Vol. 12 Iss. 4 (2000)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/curtis_dyreson/13/