Review

This is a rather old paper, with this review being written almost a decade after its publication. Nevertheless, it is still perhaps the best analysis of the similarities and differences between temporal data management in the fields of databases, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. These three fields, while having some common concerns, apply quite different approaches and terminology, and it can be difficult to sort them out.

This paper is comprehensive and complete, applying six rather diverse models to a single well-chosen case study. I was especially impressed by the thoroughness of this case study. When people ask me, as they often do, how the database and AI approaches to temporal data differ, I point them to this paper, which is still the best comparative analysis of these approaches.