It is commonly recognized that temporal representation and reasoning issues occupy a central position in the areas of artificial intelligence, databases, and theoretical computer science. Temporal concerns permeated research in artificial intelligence from the beginning, as witnessed by the seminal work by MacCarthy and Hayes and by Kahn and Gorry on knowledge representation and common sense reasoning. The need to store and to query information that changes over time is at the origin of the proposal of temporal databases, which provide a uniform framework for the management of past, present, and future data. Finally, in the eighties temporal logic became increasingly important in theoretical computer science, mainly due to Manna and PnueliΓs work on its use for the specification and verification of reactive systems, and it is currently a well established and respected topic in the area.
A multi-disciplinary perspective on temporal issues in computer science is nowadays a matter of topical interest. On the one hand, it allows researchers to reuse relevant results from a given field for studying problems in another one; on the other hand, it makes the work developed by a given community more accessible to people from outside. There exists a number of meaningful examples of these interactions. We only mention some of them, such as the successful application of model checking techniques in planning and plan validation, the impact of the distinction between valid and transaction times in temporal databases on the research on temporal logic combination, the exploitation of well-known results in automata theory to the treatment of time granularity in temporal databases, and the application of temporal constraint reasoning techniques in workflows, object and relational databases, and data mining.
There have been many international workshops on various temporal aspects of information processing, but a single multi-disciplinary international event on this topic has been repeating on a yearly basis since 1994 with a growing success: the TIME symposium. The TIME symposium series collects contributions from the areas of artificial intelligence, databases, and theoretical computer science into a single container. The multi-disciplinary composition of the recently constituted Steering Committee aims at further promoting the cross-fertilization of ideas and results. This effort is even more important considering that research in temporal representation and reasoning has a chance to show its potential also in a wide range of emerging applications related to the network-based computing paradigm. Citing only a few of them, time management is needed in inter-organizational workflows, monitoring and optimization of web services, temporal versioning in XML, synchronization of multimedia delivery, and time/location based services for mobile computing.