Extending BCDM to Cope with Proposals and Evaluations of Updates
The cooperative construction of data/knowledge bases has recently had a significant impulse (see, e. g., Wikipedia [1]). In cases in which data/knowledge quality and reliability are crucial, proposals of update/insertion/deletion need to be evaluated by experts. To the best of our knowledge, no theoretical framework has been devised to model the semantics of update proposal/evaluation in the relational context. Since time is an intrinsic part of most domains (as well as of the proposal/evaluation process itself), semantic approaches to temporal relational databases (specifically, Bitemporal Conceptual Data Model (henceforth, BCDM) [2]) are the starting point of our approach. In this paper, we propose BCDMPV, a semantic temporal relational model that extends BCDM to deal with multiple update/insertion/deletion proposals and with acceptances/rejections of proposals themselves. We propose a theoretical framework, defining the new data structures, manipulation operations and temporal relational algebra and proving some basic properties, namely that BCDMPV is a consistent extension of BCDM and that it is reducible to BCDM. These properties ensure consistency with most relational temporal database frameworks, facilitating implementations.
temporal databases database semantics database design modeling and management