• Main Page
• People
• Publications
• Software
• Other TimeCenter Resources
• Acknowledgements

Overview

TimeCenter is an international center for the support of temporal database applications on traditional and emerging DBMS technologies.

Recent advances in temporal query languages and data models clearly demonstrate that database applications that manage time-varying data--and most do--may benefit substantially from built-in temporal support in the database technology used. In spite of this, and although temporal databases has been an active area of research for fifteen years, temporal database technology has so far had little impact on practice. It is the goal of TimeCenter to contribute substantially to changing this state of affairs.

While others are pursuing valuable organizational solutions to the general problem of effective technology transfer, TimeCenter focusses on technical solutions and aims at developing temporal database technology that is expressly transferable. Such technology allows for the continued operation of legacy code, for the harmonious coexistence of legacy and new application code and for the reuse of programmer expertise and knowledge. It also allows for maximal, effective, and efficient reuse of the functionality already provided by current database management systems. Together, these properties lead to a technology that is attractive to use and is manageable to implement.

TimeCenter aims at exploring theoretical foundation for developing such technology and at prototyping it. The TimeCenter architecture, in addition to being transferable, is migratable , i.e., it is open for the gradual integration of high-performance, special-purpose temporal query processing modules.

This page summarizes activities within TimeCenter at the University of Arizona. The homepage for the entire TimeCenter project can be found here.