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Encyclopedia of Database Systems pp 3970–3975Cite as

Temporal Granularity

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Synonyms

Temporal type; Time granularity

Definition

In the context of databases, a temporal granularity can be used to specify the temporal qualification of a set of data, similar to its use in the temporal qualification of statements in natural languages. For example, in a relational database, the timestamp associated with an attribute value or a tuple may be interpreted as associating that data with one or more granules of a given temporal granularity (e.g., one or more days). As opposed to using instants from a system-specific time domain, the use of user-defined granularities enables both more compact representations and temporal qualifications at different levels of abstraction. Temporal granularities include very common ones like hours, days, weeks, months, and years, as well as the evolution and specialization of these granularities for specific contexts or applications: trading days, banking days, academic semesters, etc. Intuitively, a temporal granularity is defined by...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Claudio Bettini

  2. School of Computer Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    X. Sean Wang

  3. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

Authors
  1. Claudio Bettini
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  2. X. Sean Wang
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  3. Sushil Jajodia
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Claudio Bettini .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Richard T. Snodgrass

  2. Aalborg University, Aalborg Øst, Denmark

    Christian S. Jensen

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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Bettini, C., Wang, X.S., Jajodia, S. (2018). Temporal Granularity. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_397

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