A new architecture for a temporal data management system (TDMS) is described. The TDMS represents a pragmatic approach to the modeling and handling of time-dependent data values. Unfortunately, the paper, received in 1989 and issued in 1992, does not mention relationships to more recent works in this area, such as Navathe and Rafi [1] and Tansel et al. [2].

The paper is devoted to the conceptual framework of the TDMS (Section 2), the architecture of the TDMS (Section 3), the operational model of the TDMS (Section 4), and the physical model of the TDMS (Section 5). A contribution of the paper is its distinction between progressive updates (which reflect changes in the real world) and corrective updates (which correct errors in data).

The paper briefly covers many aspects of TDMSs that are interesting in themselves, including implementation techniques involving the landmark approach. The presentation of the TDMS in the given style has only an informational value for the wider database community.