Overview
TAU is an umbrella project comprised of a number of inter-related and complementary projects, all with the goal of providing to users, through sophisticated user languages and APIs, facilities to manage time-oriented data.
The name of the project was inspired by three associations. The acronym is "Temporal Access for Users" which concisely describes the project. The project name is the English spelling of the Greek letter "τ", which is commonly used in scientific formalisms to denote time. And the Greek letter resembles an umbrella, emphasizing the sub-projects comprising this overall project.
Our goal is to realize the theoretical advances over the last decade in temporal databases in practical, efficient, correct, well-engineered and documented interfaces that can be used by the application developer or database user. A second, consistent goal is to leverage each system with the other systems, to provide comprehensive support. Hence, the temporal data types and granularities made available in τZaman can be utilized in XSchema directly and also in τXSchema, the latter to describe time-varying XML data, stored efficiently by τBerkeleyDB, queried and returned as a result by τXQuery, and utilized in τDOM when manipulating time-varying XML documents.
(Note that there was an unrelated project also called TAU at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, to investigate the development of temporal extensions to the object-oriented paradigm. That project, active from 1996 to 2000, was named after the elementary particle discovered by Martin Perl, which has a a lifespan of merely one femtosecond, one million billionth of a second.)
Projects
τBerkeleyDB
τDOM
τXSchema
τXQuery
τZaman
People
Faculty:
Faiz A Currim
Sabah Currim
Curtis Dyreson
Richard T.Snodgrass (Director)
Marianne Winslett
Graduate Students:
Ricardo Carlos
Dengfeng Gao
Qing Ju
Soumyadeb Mitra
Kyriacos Pavlou
Stephen Thomas
Undergraduate Students:
Daniel Anderson
Christopher Goo
Alex Henniges
Alex Jerabek
Bryan Laipple
Michael Patterson
Previous Faculty:
Christian S. Collberg
Previous Graduate Students:
Lei Ding
Natasha Gaitonde
Andrew Hay
Haifeng He
Huilong Huang
Shailesh Joshi
Yong Liang
Haitao Liu
Yuhong Liu
Jessica K. Miller
Kalyani Mandapaka
Supratik Maitra
Mingde Qiu
Manigantan Sethuraman
Shilong (Stanley) Yao
Bedirhan Urgun
Seunghwan You
Man Zhang
Previous Undergraduate Students:
Melinda Malmgren
Eric Roeder
Webmaster: Qing Ju