The overall objective of ORES is to develop a demonstrator temporal database management system (TDBMS) that will support efficient and user-friendly representation and manipulation of temporal data.

This objective is based on the needs of:

- users, who require an enhanced DBMS functionality that can satisfy queries on temporal data
- DBMS vendors, who want to address a wider market
- software developers, who need increased functionality in CASE repositories and toolsets for supporting versioning, change analysis and decision analysis.

The approach will be to extend the relational DBMS INGRES. This will be supported by the specification of a temporal formalism. The intention is to develop:

- a formal foundation for temporal representation and reasoning for temporal databases
- languages and user-friendly interfaces for temporal data definition, querying and manipulation
- a temporal query language that will be upwardly consistent with current standards (such as SQL) in the database area.

The work will be driven by user needs, defined by a case study at the Hospital Clinica Puerta de Hierro.