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This glossary contains concepts specific to temporal databases that are well-defined, well understood, and widely used. In addition to defining and naming the concepts, the glossary also explains the decisions made. It lists competing alternatives and discusses the pros and cons of these. It also includes evaluation criteria for the naming of concepts.This paper is a structured presentation of the results of e-mail discussions initiated during the preparation of the first book on temporal databases, Temporal Databases: Theory, Design, and Implementation, published by Benjamin/Cummings, to appear January 1993. Independently of the book, an initiative aimed at designing a consensus Temporal SQL is under way. The paper is a contribution towards establishing common terminology, an initial subtask of this initiative.

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.

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The affiliations and e-mail addresses of the TSQL2 Language Design Committee members may be found i n a seg arate section at the end of the document.