ChronusOver the past decade, the number, size, and complexity of databases for biomedical research have grown dramatically. As a result, the opportunities for data-driven inquiry have expanded enormously and led to new challenges in informatics research. The detection of temporal trends and temporal patterns in data is central to much of this research. Although such temporal queries are common - indeed central - in these analyses, the biomedical field has no standard means for making them. Chronus is a tool that attempts to address this problem. Chronus is a database mediator that extends the SQL query language and the standard relational model to support temporal queries on relational databases. It provides an expressive SQL-based temporal query langauge that allows users to easily write complex temporal queries. |