Looking at the world thru colored glasses

Abstract

There are two central issues in the curation of (scientific) databases: annotation management and archiving. Both issues have been addressed by the Edinburgh database group and led to the MONDRIAN annotation management system and the XArch archiving system, respectively. In this paper, we present an application of MONDRIAN to represent and query the history of evolving databases. We show how the annotation model and query language underlying MONDRIAN not only allows to answer queries about how individual data values change over time, but also allows to capture and query structural changes that occur in a database over time, beyond the querying functionalities that XArch currently offers. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.