A temporal XML data model and its implementation in anaesthesia information systems

Abstract

Information systema are widely used in health domain. In today's world, medical records, hospital systems, anaesthesia information systems are some of the crucial parts of the health systems. Time is very important information systems. From the point of medical reserach, auditing and medico legal aspects, without the time in health information systems such as electronic medical records, decision support systems and anaesthesia records, information can not be represented and queried correctly. In the literature, valid and transaction times are the most frequently used temporal dimensions. However decision and avaibility times are also needed in order to store and represent information accurately. In today's healthcare institutions data are stored in variety of systems. As an emering technology, XML solves most of the problems such as data exchange and different structures in health information systems. The main contributions of this thesis are summarized as follows. Combining the requirements of XML and time, we propose a temporal XML data model for anaesthesia information systems with four different temporal dimensions: valid time, transaction time, event time and availability time. A new storage structure and a temporal index structure are proposed in order to store temporal XML data and process queries efficiently. A variety of queries are tested on the proposed model and two different alternative systems which are designed for partially dimensional queries and now relative bitemporal data. The experiments show that the proposed model has better performance for temporal partially dimensional range queries and now relative data.