Patient requests for "inappropriate" medical treatment (violations of the standard of care) based on religious beliefs should have special standing. Nevertheless, not all such requests should be honored, because some are morally disturbing. The trouble lies in deciding which ones count. This paper proposes criteria that would qualify a religious belief as medically valid to help physicians deci...

To support temporal operators and to increase the efficiency of temporal queries, indexing based on temporal attributes is required. We consider the problem of indexing the temporal dimension in valid time databases. We assume that the temporal information of data objects are represented as valid time intervals that have to be managed dynamically by an efficient index structure. Unlike the time...