structureKalends

StructureKalends is a conceptual data structure and architectural pattern for organizing time-stamped data by a hierarchical calendar. The term combines the idea of a calendar with a structured decomposition of time, grouping events by year, month, day, and finer time units to enable efficient storage and querying of temporal records.

The data model consists of a tree where each node corresponds to a calendrical unit. The top level is a year node containing month nodes, which contain day nodes, which in turn contain hour or minute nodes or directly event leaves. Each event is stored at the leaf corresponding to its timestamp, and each non-leaf node maintains aggregates such as the number of events in its subtree or a list of pointers to its children. The structure supports operations such as addEvent(timestamp, payload), removeEvent, and queryRange(startTimestamp, endTimestamp). Range queries descend the tree, skipping entire subtrees that lie outside the query interval.

Performance characteristics depend on the balancing strategy. A balanced variant provides near-logarithmic insertion and query times with respect to the number of distinct time units stored, while a more compact, sparse representation reduces memory usage in datasets with irregular temporal distribution.

Common use cases include scheduling systems, time-series logging, and analytics pipelines where calendar-aligned aggregation is beneficial. Variants exist that adapt the hierarchy granularity (year-only, month-level, or day-level) or extend the model with metadata such as time zones, event priorities, or recurrence rules.

Limitations include complexity of maintenance for very large spans, potential memory overhead for dense intervals, and the need for concurrency control in multi-threaded contexts.