FUZZY INTERVALS TO REPRESENT FUZZY VALID TIME IN A TEMPORAL RELATIONAL DATABASE

Temporal databases offer a common framework to those database applications that need to store or handle different types of temporal data from a variety of sources. They allow the concept of time to be handled from the point of view of meaning, representation, and manipulation. Although at first sight the incorporation of time into a database might appear to be a direct and simple task, it is, however, quite complex: not only must new structures and specific operators be included, but the semantics of conventional DML sentences (insert, update, or delete) and queries must be appropriately changed. In addition, temporal information is not always as precise as desired since it might be affected by imprecision due to the use of natural language or to the nature of the information source. In this paper, we deal with the problem of the update (and, implicitly, insert and delete) and query operations when time is expressed by means of a fuzzy interval of dates