Retrieval of Information from Temporal Document Databases

Current technology allows us to create large databases of documents that afterwards can be accessed in several ways. However, the resulting systems do not offer proper tools for retrieving historical information from the stored documents by considering their temporal properties. Starting from an object-oriented database model that represents documents together with their temporal features, the main proposal of this paper is a family of new query operators called chronicles. By means of time intervals indicating the temporal location of document contents, chronicles group documents according to several temporal patterns so that their relationships are more evident. Among other things, chronicles are useful to determine the evolution of events, to search for certain temporal patterns, and to find out cause-effect relationships among documents. 1. Introduction Nowadays there are not available any information retrieval system nor document database with special tools for retrievin..