Incorporating Time in the New World of Computing System
Poh, 1986
Category: Database Systems
Overall Rating
Score Breakdown
- Cross Disciplinary Applicability: 4/10
- Latent Novelty Potential: 3/10
- Obscurity Advantage: 4/5
- Technical Timeliness: 1/10
Synthesized Summary
This paper addresses important problems in temporal databases, namely representing continuous time, handling endpoint ambiguity, and managing precision.
its technical solutions are tied to an obsolete system, employ a flawed floating-point time representation with acknowledged rounding errors, and rely on a brittle rule-based natural language processing approach.
The specific methods do not offer a unique, actionable path for modern research that isn't better addressed by current, more robust, and standardized approaches.
Its core technical approaches are fundamentally flawed or have been superseded by significantly more robust, scalable, and generalizable methods.
Optimist's View
the paper's specific approach to representing time as a single continuous floating-point value from a fixed epoch, combined with a detailed mechanism for handling endpoint ambiguities (end_at, end_in, end_out) and the concept of "depth of focus" for managing precision, offers potentially overlooked nuances.
The concepts of handling temporal uncertainty and managing precision could transfer to other fields dealing with noisy or imprecise time-series data, or scientific computing where time is often treated as a continuous numerical variable.
Modern computational resources... could enable a more robust and scalable implementation of the techniques discussed, particularly the dynamic precision management (depth of focus) and the detailed logic for endpoint handling.
Build upon the paper's detailed handling of endpoint semantics (end_at, end_in, end_out) to explicitly model and query temporal uncertainty.
Skeptic's View
The fundamental premise of this paper – incorporating time into the "New World of Computing System" – immediately dates it and severely limits its modern relevance.
This paper likely faded into obscurity precisely because it was a solution built for a specific, non-standard, and ultimately unsuccessful system (the New World System).
The fixed-origin floating-point representation... is fundamentally problematic... introduces inherent rounding errors, which necessitate ad-hoc workarounds like "depth of focus".
The reliance on a large set of hand-coded rewrite rules... for parsing temporal expressions is a major technical weakness.
Final Takeaway / Relevance
Ignore