Navigational accesses in a temporal object model

A considerable research effort has been devoted in past years to query languages for temporal data in the context of both the relational and the object-oriented model. Object-oriented databases provide a navigational approach for data access based on object references. In this paper, we investigate the navigational approach to querying object-oriented databases. We formally define the notion of temporal path expression, and we address on a formal basis issues related to the correctness of such expressions. In particular, we focus on static analysis and give a set of conditions ensuring that an expression always results in a correct access at runtime.