The temporal aspect, or temporality, of any fact or information. Several temporal dimensions can be defined, such as valid time, describing when the fact or the information is true in the real word, and transaction time, describing when the fact or the information is current in the database management system (DBMS).
Published in Chapter:
Temporalities for Workflow Management Systems
Carlo Combi (Universita degli Studi di Verona, Italy) and Giuseppe Pozzi (Politecnico Di Milano, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-288-6.ch012
Abstract
Time is a very important dimension of any aspect in human life, affecting also information and information management. As such, time must be dealt with in a suitable way, considering all its facets. The related literature already considered temporal information management from a pure database point of view: temporal aspects (also known as temporalities) of stored information cannot be neglected and the adoption of a suitable database management system (Temporal Database Management System - TDBMS) could be helpful. Recently, research of the temporal data management area started to consider business processes, extending and enriching models, techniques, and architectures to suitably manage temporal aspects. According to this scenario, the authors discuss here some of the main advantages achievable in managing temporal aspects and consider temporalities in process models, in exception definition, in the architecture of a Workflow Management System (WfMS), and in the scheduling of tasks and their assignment to agents.