Integration of Temporal Reasoning and Temporal-Data Maintenance into a Reusable Database Mediator to Answer Abstract, Time-Oriented Queries: The Tzolkin System

  • Authors:

  • John H. Nguyen;Yuval Shahar;Samson W. Tu;Amar K. Das;Mark A. Musen

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5479. jnguyen@smi.stanford.edu;Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5479. shahar@smi.stanford.edu;Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5479. tu@smi.stanford.edu;Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5479. das@smi.stanford.edu;Stanford Medical Informatics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305-5479. musen@smi.stanford.edu

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Intelligent Information Systems - Special issue on integrating artificial intelligene and database technologies
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

The ability to reason with time-oriented data is centralto the practice of medicine. Monitoring clinical variables over timeoften provides information that drives medical decision making (e.g.,clinical diagnosis and therapy planning). Because the time-orientedpatient data are often stored in electronic databases, it isimportant to ensure that clinicians and medical decision-supportapplications can conveniently find answers to their clinical queriesusing these databases. To help clinicians and decision-supportapplications make medical decisions using time-oriented data, adatabase-management system should (1) permit the expression ofabstract, time-oriented queries, (2) permit the retrieval of datathat satisfy a given set of time-oriented data-selection criteria,and (3) present the retrieved data at the appropriate level ofabstraction. We impose these criteria to facilitate the expression ofclinical queries and to reduce the manual data processing that usersmust undertake to decipher the answers to their queries. We describea system, Tzolkin, that integrates a general method for temporal-datamaintenance with a general method for temporal reasoning to meetthese criteria. Tzolkin allows clinicians to use SQL-like temporalqueries to retrieve both raw, time-oriented data and dynamicallygenerated summaries of those data. Tzolkin can be used as astandalone system or as a module that serves other software systems.We implement Tzolkin with a temporal-database mediator approach. Thisapproach is general, facilitates software reuse, and thus decreasesthe cost of building new software systems that require thisfunctionality.