paststructured

Paststructured is a design and modeling approach for organizing information with an emphasis on preserving the past. In paststructured systems, data objects are maintained with full historical state information, time stamps, and explicit provenance, allowing reconstruction of any state or event sequence at any point in time. The approach relies on versioning, immutable event logs, and structured metadata that describe when changes occurred and why.

In practice, paststructured often uses structured records that capture events, states, and their relationships as first-class citizens. Queries are oriented toward historical inquiry, such as what a object looked like on a given date or which events led to a particular state. The framework supports bidirectional links between events and states and maintains a lineage graph for traceability.

Paststructured shares concepts with temporal databases, event sourcing, and data provenance models but differs in its prioritization of historical reconstruction in the design of schemas and APIs. It is applied in software engineering for audit trails, in archival and historical research, and in any domain requiring rigorous reconstructability of past states.

Challenges include increased storage requirements, complexity of query design, and considerations for privacy and data retention. Critics argue that focusing on past states can complicate current-state operations and real-time processing.

See also: temporal database, event sourcing, data provenance, knowledge graph.