Timecentered

Timecentered is a design and analysis approach that places temporality at the center of modeling, architecture, and interaction. It treats time as a first-class dimension, alongside entities and attributes, and seeks to make time explicit in data models, interfaces, and workflows. In timecentered systems, operations are defined in terms of time, such as events with timestamps, durations, time intervals, and validity periods; time zones and daylight saving are managed explicitly.

Key concepts include event-centric and interval-based representations, provenance and historical views, bi-temporal models capturing both valid time and transaction time, and time-aware APIs that support time-based queries and temporal navigation. Data storage is often optimized for time-series or temporal queries, and versioning or snapshotting is common.

Applications span software engineering, data management, and analytics. Timecentered approaches are prominent in time-series databases, event-driven architectures, real-time monitoring, financial systems with precise timestamps, IoT telemetry, and healthcare or logistics where historical records and scheduling are essential. They enable retrospective analysis, auditing, forecasting, and scenario evaluation by preserving temporal context.

Relation to other concepts: timecentered shares ground with temporal databases, bi-temporal modeling, event sourcing, and time-series analysis, while differing from approaches that center on entities or structures rather than time.

Challenges include storage overhead, increasing query complexity, handling of time zones and clock skew, and ensuring consistent temporal semantics across distributed components.