tOWL: A temporal Web Ontology Language Published in SMC, Part B

SMCViorel Milea, dr. Flavius Frasincar, and prof.dr.ir. Uzay Kaymak published a paper on a temporal Web ontology language in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics.

Through its interoperability and reasoning capabilities, the Semantic Web opens a realm of possibilities for developing intelligent systems on the Web. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is the most expressive standard language for modeling ontologies, the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. However, up until now, no standard way of expressing time and time-dependent information in OWL has been provided. Hence in this paper, the authors present a temporal extension of the very expressive fragment SHIN(D) of the OWL Description Logic language, resulting in the temporal OWL language: tOWL. Through a layered approach, Milea et al. introduce three extensions: 1) concrete domains, which allow the representation of restrictions using concrete domain binary predicates; 2) temporal representation , which introduces time points, relations between time points, intervals, and Allen's 13 interval relations into the language; and 3) timeslices/fluents, which implement a perdurantist view on individuals and allow for the representation of complex temporal aspects, such as process state transitions. The expressiveness of the newly introduced language by is illustrated using an example from the financial domain.

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