Consistency of temporal XML documents

Abstract

Different models have been recently proposed for representing temporal data, tracking historical information, and recovering the state of the document as of any given time, in XML documents. After presenting an abstract model for temporal XML, we discuss the problem of the validation of the temporal constraints imposed by this model. We first review the problem of checking and fixing isolated temporal inconsistencies. Then, we move on to study validation of a document when many temporal inconsistencies of different kinds are present. We study the conditions that allow to treat each inconsistency isolated from the rest, and give the corresponding proofs. These properties are intended to be the basis of efficient algorithms for checking temporal consistency in XML.