Design of a temporal database for phlebitis

Phlebitis (vein irritation) is one of the most common complications resulting from intravascular therapy. A large volume of data regarding demographic, mechanical, chemical and biological factors is collected for each patient over time. Our objective is to present a design for the phlebitis database. Our major contribution is in presenting a systematic design approach for this complex temporal database. A variety of temporal data models and query languages have been proposed in the literature. However, our analysis of the phlebitis data revealed that no single model could capture all the semantic characteristics of this data. One reason could be that most examples considered in the temporal database literature are typical business applications with a much simpler temporal structure. However, we found a combination of some of the proposed data models adequate for our application. A major consideration in our design approach was that we eventually plan to implement the temporal representation and temporal query facilities on top of a commercial relational database management system.