This project addresses the problem of developing reliable, flexible and maintainable business information systems. It builds on the results of an earlier ESPRIT project (RUBRIC) which developed a paradigm for specifying a business system by a set of rules reflecting the business environment. The goal of TEMPORA is to apply and further extend this paradigm in two directions.
The means by which the executable temporal logic paradigm known as the declarative past and imperative future can be used to describe the query and updating of databases is presented. The implicit representation of time and evolving facts in a historical database is discussed, and how temporal logic is used as its query language. A set of temporal logic specifications is added to a historical database and the executable temporal logic paradigm is applied to the resulting system to model updates; this is achieved by a combination of the declarative and imperative readings of temporal formulae provided by this paradigm. The effects of altering of information about the past on the validity of past actions is described, and methods by which the database may be made consistent again with respect to the specification are outlined.

The project addresses the problem of developing reliable, flexible and maintainable business information systems. It has built on the results of an earlier ESPRIT project which developed a paradigm for specifying a business system by a set of rules reflecting the business environment. The goal of this project is to apply and further extend the paradigm in 2 directions.
The paradigm is integrated with a state of the art database management system (DBMS) for exploitation in an industrial environment, supported by further development of existing tools for supporting the design discipline of the rule based paradigm and the delivery of application software.
The rule based paradigm is extended to allow the explicit modelling of dynamic and temporal information.

Work concentrated on designing the architecture and the operating principles of the systems as well as on developing key prototype tools for both the modelling the run time phase of the information system. The strategy and tools were successfully tested. In the second phase of the project emphasis was put on further integrating the different components of the architecture as well as on optimizing the dynamic and temporal aspects. The interaction between the user and the information system is studied and tools developed to support that process. Finally the Tempora information system development strategy will be specified in an integrated way and the design methodology will be made explicit and will be formalized.
First the paradigm is integrated with a state-of-the-art RDBMS for exploitation in an industrial environment. This is supported by the development of tools for supporting the design discipline of the rule-based paradigm and the delivery of application software.

Second, the rule-based paradigm is extended to allow the explicit modelling of dynamic and temporal information. This is achieved by using a temporal logic-like language for expressing the rules. This extension is integrated into the design discipline and its exploitation in the run-time environment.