Time Automaton: A visual mechanism for temporal querying

Available visual temporal querying tools do not provide the means for formulating complex temporal queries. For these queries users have to adopt text-based querying languages, such as SQL. The problem, however, is that using text-based languages is less comfortable than using visual tools and, most important, in some cases temporal queries can be extremely difficult to formulate for users that do not possess programming competences. In this paper we propose the Time Automaton, a highly flexible visual mechanism that enables the formulation of a large set of different types of temporal queries, ranging from the simple to the most complex ones. In order to test the Time Automaton we used a representative sample of temporal queries extracted from the matured OWL Time Ontology. Also, to test the Time Automaton in a real word scenario we created a visual interface that implements the mechanism and we used it to analyze a real dataset.