Temporal Branching as a conflict management technique

The current research attempts to model a technique for managing conflicts within an integrated database. An integrated database being a database whose schema is an integration of several external database schemas, independent of each other. The independence of the systems allows conflicting values to be entered into the same data objects. For example, one system may hold the value of female for a specific data object where as another may hold male. The conflict is only discovered when the data objects are brought to the integrated database, and then there is need to resolve the conflict. A technique to manage conflicts is developed based on version management, used in temporal databases, and the log-file approach used in more conventional technologies. The model combines temporal database tools with distributed database management tools. Thus it obtains greater flexibility than existing replication and log-file techniques and is more economic in record volume than the temporal approach.