Publication
An OWL Ontology for Biographical Knowledge. Representing Time-Dependent Factual Knowledge
Hans-Ulrich Krieger; Thierry Declerck
In: Proceedings of the First Conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World 2015. Biographical Data in a Digital World (BD-2015), April 9, Amsterdam, Netherlands, CEURS-WS.org, 7/2015.
Abstract
Representing time-dependent information has become increasingly
important for reasoning and querying services defined on top of
RDF and OWL.
In particular, addressing this task properly is vital for practical
applications such as modern biographical information systems, but
also for the Semantic Web/Web 2.0/Social Web in general.
Extending binary relation instances with temporal information often
translates into a massive proliferation of useless container objects
when trying to keep the underlying RDF model.
In this paper, we argue for directly extending RDF triples with further
arguments in order to easily represent time-dependent factual
knowledge and to allow for practical forms of reasoning.
We also report on a freely available lightweight OWL ontology for
representing biographical knowledge that models entities of interest
via a tri-partite structure of the pairwise disjoint classes
Abstract, Object, and Happening.
Even though the ontology was manually developed utilizing the
Protege ontology editor, and thus sticking to the triple model of
RDF, the meta-modelling facilities allowed us to cross-classify
all properties as being either synchronic or diachronic.
When viewing the temporal arguments as "extra" arguments that only
apply to relation instances, universal biographical knowledge from the
ontology can still be described as if there is no time.