Temporal representation and reasoning in medicine

Temporal representation and reasoning is a very challenging research topic in several areas of computer science: among them, we mention here databases, artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, computational linguistics, real time systems, and medical informatics. The scientific interest for temporal representation and reasoning is confirmed by a solid tradition of international events, as conferences and workshops, hosting new research on these arguments. Moreover, in the last decade there have been several specific events on the topic, which attracted specialized people sharing their results. Among these events, the TIME Symposium is emerging as the annual event where people from different areas of computer science discuss on time related issues; since 1996 TIME proceedings have been published by IEEE Computer Society. Several special issues of well known scientific journals in the last decade confirm that the interest of the scientific community for the considered topic is stable and sound, even though time and related issues are not a topic suddenly attracting huge quantities of research scientists.