History in Temporal Databases

Synonyms

Temporal evolution; Temporal value; Time sequence; Time series

Definition

The history of an “object” of the real world or of a database is the temporal representation of that object. Depending on the specific object, one can have attribute histories, entity histories, relationship histories, schema histories, transaction histories, etc.

Key Points

“History” is a general concept, intended in the sense of “train of events connected with a person or thing.”

In the realm of temporal databases, the concept of history is intended to include multiple time dimensions as well as multiple data models. Thus one can have, e.g., valid-time histories, transaction-time histories, and bitemporal histories. Also multi-dimensional histories can be defined from mono-dimensional ones (e.g., a bitemporal history can be seen as the transaction-time history of a valid-time history).

The term “history,” defined formally or informally, has been used in many temporal database papers, also to explain...