What is Time Indexing

The technology for time-indexing provides a way of utilizing a specialized container for data that is time-ordered. The container has been designed from its inception to be optimized for building applications that have inherently time-ordered data.

The design is based on some proven academic research that is being brought to market and commercialised. The original research had a narrow focus, namely, to record and playback Internet-based video conferences. This commercial version has a broader scope than the original work and encapsulates ideas from commercial applications used in the financial and data analysis arenas which deal with time-series data. This has been done in order to increase the applicability of time-indexing to a much wider range of data sets and applications. The concept of time-indexing was novel when the original research was done, but with the inclusion of the extra ideas the result is some cutting edge technology.

The design of time-indexing defines two main things. The first thing defined is the set of operations on the container, the second thing defined is the set of data formats that the container can be in. The fundamentals of time-indexing technology is therefore, programming language independent. From the definitions of thr operations and the data formats, a language specific binding can be written which allows applications to utilize time-indexing in virtually any programming language.

Time-indexing has a set of interesting properties and features which allow applications to store and access data held at particular times. The data itself is held in a time-indexed container, and the features provided allow the applications to store and access the data held at particular times, thus allowing the applications to process the data in an application specific way. Time-indexing does not interfere with the data itself, but provides a time navigation mechanism to get to data.

Time-indexing is not a specific application in its own right, rather it is a shell for building time-based applications. This is in a similar way that a traditional database is not a specific application, but is a shell for building data-centric applications. In both cases, if there is no data and no application code then, neither have any specific function. It is only when data is put in them, and application code is written that some useful function prevails.

In time-indexing, time is the primary item, and time-indexing is specialized for time-based tasks. Everything is presented as streams of time, with data attached at particular times. More general storage mechanisms, such as databases, make many compromises to do the task of data manipulation well, but do time-indexing poorly.