Queries in a temporal modelling system

Abstract

A temporal modelling framework (Yeo and Li, 1996) was proposed to allow dynamic modelling along the time dimension. Specifically, a new time genus with many variations has been added to the Structured Modelling (Geoffrion, 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1991) framework. The variations take care of special properties of time in modelling such as orderedness and useful modelling concepts such as circular time and scoping among others. This paper further explores some possible time-specific queries based on the proposed temporal modelling framework. Because the knowledge has been embedded in a structured model, a simplified SQL-like manipulation language can be used to formulate the queries. Queries for retrieval, genus evaluation, and sensitivity analysis are discussed. It is believed that the exploration here would be helpful in designing a unified query language in modelling.