Chapter 5. Temporal Patterns

	"Time is not a line, but a series of now-points"
	--Taisen Deshimaru

Time is the most important attribute of any event. Without the time attribute, no event has any meaning. It is not just the time occurred; there are many other time-related attributes in an event. Events change state over a period of time, and all these points of time where there is a change of state become part of the event. Together, they become individual time attributes. These time attributes are used to perform a lot of analyses, processing, and reporting activities related to the events. In this case, if an event is considered as a data point, time is part of this data point.

There is another class of data points that change over a period of time, known as temporal data. Whenever these data points are captured, it is mandatory to capture the related time as well. In other words, these data points don't have an independent existence without the associated...