Incorporating Time in the New World of Computing Systems

Abstract

The New World of Computing System, referred to as the New World system, is a total system for the structuring, manipulation and communication of information. Time is a ubiquitous aspect of most databases. The aim of this thesis is to study the problems associated with the implementation of time in the New World system. Time information is not only stored in New World, they can be retrieved and processed to answer various types of user queries. This is an additional feature as compared to most models of time implementation in databases where the relationships between time intervals are not dealt with. To start with, ways of representing time in the form of floating point number are devised and discussed. Then the conversion of time information from its various user accustomed forms to New World system internal form and back are explored. Finally, the ambiguities and complexities involved in finding the intersection, subtraction, union and extension of two different sequences of time intervals associated with an object in a database are studied and algorithms for resolving these are presented . An explanation on how the crunchers work with the addition of time information is also given. This includes discussing about how quantifiers such as at least 2, how many etc. are handled in the New World system. Case studies are also conducted to test out these routines. As conclusion, the remaining problems associated with time implementation not covered in this thesis work are discussed.