Navigating through multiple temporal granularity objects

Managing and relating temporal information at different time units is an important issue in many applications and research areas, among them temporal object-oriented databases. Due to the semantic richness of the object-oriented data model, the introduction of multiple temporal granularities in such a model poses several interesting issues. In particular, object-oriented query languages provide a navigational approach to data access, performed via path expressions. We present an extension to path expressions to a multi-granularity context. The syntax and semantics of the proposed path expressions are formally defined.