Modeling past, current, and future time in medical databases.

Recent research has focused on increasing the power of medical information systems by incorporating time into the database system. A problem with much of this research is that it fails to differentiate between historical time and future time. The concept of bitemporal lifespan presented in this paper overcomes this deficiency. Bitemporal lifespan supports the concepts of valid time and transaction time and allows the integration of past, current, and future information in a unified model. The concept of bitemporal lifespan is presented within the framework of the Extended Entity-Relationship model. This model permits the characterization of temporal properties of entities, relationships, and attributes. Bitemporal constraints are defined that must hold between entities forming "isa" hierarchies and between entities and relationships. Finally, bitemporal extensions are presented for database query languages in order to provide natural high-level operators for bitemporal query expressions.