It is difficult to imagine a successful semantic theory that does not include time as an integral component. Yet all of today's major data models – models which purport to provide a general theory on how to represent information for convenient and rapid storage and retrieval on digital computers – completely ignore this essential aspect of semantics. In this work we examine the connection between two areas of semantics, namely the semantics of databases and the semantics of natural language, and link them together via a common view of the semantics of time. In the first part we argue that an essential ingredient for the success of efforts to incorporate more real world semantics into database models is a coherent theory of the semantics of time. We describe such a database theory, and then proceed to present a formally defined English database query language whose semantic theory makes explicit reference to the notion of denotation with respect to a moment of time.

The idea that time might be an important consideration in providing an enriched database semantics is not new to this work, but it is nonetheless a relatively recent concern of database research. [Bub77], [Ser80], [Klo81], [And81], [AM82], [CW83], [Sno84], [GV85], [CC87], [GY88], and [CC88a] are among the many works that have lately investigated ways in which time might be added to a database model.