Slide 28 of 29
If temporal databases are so good, why haven’t mainstream databases adopted temporal extensions independently of GIS ? The research has been done (and is much more mature than t-GIS) but the commercial products are not there; why not ? Is GIS so special that it can push temporal-db technology faster than mainstream non-GIS db ? I doubt it.
In discussion, it became clear that the people who really need temporal GIS are researchers (and historians): in real-life practice, operational systems very rarely need systematic access to past data and are really only concerned with correct current data and a “feel-good” factor that they have the past data if they ever need it.
Thus there is tiny commercial pressure on GIS vendors to develop tGIS systems, hence no commercial systems.
The one exception is time-line systems, e.g. for time histories of stock prices, where the historical data is used operationally in stock trading, valuation and predictive modelling (to make buy/sell decisions). A plug-in (DataBlade, Cartridge etc.) to commercial (O)RDBMSs is expected soon if not already available.
