Temporality

Thoughts

  • maybe the triple format is not naturally up to the task of meta-modelled time

temporal-context

  • calendar system
  • time-slice granularity
  • fluency approach?

genesis-timestamp

  • has an associated store
  • naturally precise, but could be fuzzed
  • universal (even if not recorded)
    • e.g. every keystroke has one, with a text editor (in-memory store)
  • context is real-world, digital,
  • can be preserved or not across different stores
    • could be used for lineage
      • e.g. on every copy, the data adds a tx-ts+store-identifier
  • in RDF, a triple isn't enough (and using the graph in a quad wasteful) for expressing a transaction timestamp
    • so need to add a transaction-timestamp statement
    • but then you might go down an infinitely recursive rabbit hole of tx-timestamping the tx-timestamp statement
      • maybe tx-ts triples are special, having a tx-ts equal to the tx-ts they encode
    • if you use Relator exclusively, you are golden
  • should be automated

tombstone-timestamp

  • formery "invalidation-timestamp", but needed a new name, because it treads on valid-time

issues

  • should be stored outside the relator/data because who's to say when a piece of data is dead?

uses

  • for immutable contexts, expresses "not current"
    • can be complementary or an alternative to "Successor"?
    • corrections, like data-entry errors or buggy pipeline

validity

  • validity-start, valid-at, invalidity-start, invalid-at

    • only apply to relations
  • abstractions shouldn't lose validity

  • different kinds of validity

    • "in-world"/"in-application"
    • real-time
    • decision-time/assertion-time replaces transaction time because, for the most part, who cares when it was recorded in a store.
      • mostly, assertion-time would be equal to transaction time, at least in a "live" system

immutability

  • might be helpful to differentiate between corrections and updates, but that line is very thin and unstable,
    • e.g. in a role-playing experience platform where in-world facts get bent/corrected and truth is more of a "what we decided worked best in the narrative"
    • i wanted to say abstractions are always true, but what about the case of corrections

Prior Art

Instantiating-Identifying Concept/Relationship (IIR)

In IIR models, a concept or relationship is reified and further temporalized. Either such relationship is abstracted as a new object, or a concept is viewed as four dimensional and instantiated to have temporal extents. Singleton Property converts each relationship to be universally unique. 4D fluents use concepts that view each resource as a perdurant. Fluents represent properties that change over time

References


Children
  1. Temporality Log