Approaches to Handling Temporal Data in Object

Temporal databases are an active and fast growing research area. Although many temporal extensions of the relational data model have been proposed, there is no comparable amount of work in the context of object-oriented data models. Moreover, few of the proposed models have been implemented. This report discusses how the temporal data model developed for T Chimera [4] has been implemented on top of the Ode OODBMS [1]. In particular, two di erent approaches to handle temporal data are investigated. The rst approach relies on the Ode versioning mechanism [2]; the second one is based on the allocation of special structures for storing temporal data. The main contribution of this work is to show how time can be e ectively introduced in a conventional object-oriented context. 2