Sign of the Times - Managing inhomogeneously bitemporal data with Datomic and Clojure

Time is confusing. Sometimes, it's so confusing that our thinking about it changes... over time. Which makes it triply confusing, or something. In this post, I want to talk about two aspects of temporal data, both common, useful and often misunderstood:

  • Homogeneous vs Inhomogeneous
  • Temporal vs Bitemporal

Homogeneous Temporal Data

The first thing to stress is that we're talking about homogeneous data, because "homogenous" means something completely different.

In a homogeneous, temporal data set, one column will contain a known sequence of discrete time values, and the other columns will contain whatever information is associated with those times.

You would …

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