Conceptual modelling and manipulation of temporal databases

The overall aim of this paper is to briefly introduce our approach to temporal data modelling described as the ORES methodology. The ORES Temporal Database Management System (TDBMS), which consists of the methodology together the supporting software tools, will provide the efficient and user friendly representation and manipulation of temporal knowledge. More specifically, this paper is concerned with the definition and manipulation of temporal data at the conceptual level. It therefore concentrates on describing such a tool, namely the query language ERT-SQL, with the help of some illustrative examples.