This document contains definitions of a wide range of concepts specific to and widely used within temporal databases. In addition to providing definitions, the document also includes separate explanations of many of the defined concepts. Two sets of criteria are included. First, all included concepts were required to satisfy four relevance criteria, and, second, the naming of the concepts was resolved using a set of evaluation criteria. The concepts are grouped into three categories: concepts of general database interest, of temporal database interest, and of specialized interest. This document is a digest of a full version of the glossary 1 . In addition to the material included here, the full version includes substantial discussions of the naming of the concepts.The consensus effort that lead to this glossary was initiated in Early 1992. Earlier status documents appeared in March 1993 and December 1992 and included terms proposed after an initial glossary appeared in SIGMOD Record in September 1992. The present glossary subsumes all the previous documents. It was most recently discussed at the "ARPA/NSF International Workshop on an Infrastructure for Temporal Databases," in Arlington, TX, June 1993, and is recommended by a significant part of the temporal database community. The glossary meets a need for creating a higher degree of consensus on the definition and naming of temporal database concepts.

The paper “Proposed Temporal Database Concepts— May 1993” contained a complete set of glossary entries proposed by members of the temporal database community from Spring 1992 until May 1993. The aim of the proposal was to define a consensus glossary of temporal database concepts and names. Several glossary entries (Section 3) were included in the proposal, but were still unresolved at the time of the deadline. This addendum reflects on-going discussions and contains revised versions of several unresolved entries. The entries here thus supersede the corresponding entries in Section 3 of the proposal.