Publikation
Where Temporal Description Logics Fail: Representing Temporally-Changing Relationships
Hans-Ulrich Krieger
In: Andreas Dengel; K. Berns; Thomas Breuel; Frank Bomarius; Thomas Roth-Berghofer (Hrsg.). KI 2008: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI-2008), 31st, September 23-26, Kaiserslautern, Pages 249-257, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), No. 5243, ISBN 978-3-540-85844-7, Springer, Berlin, 2008.
Zusammenfassung
Representing temporally-changing information becomes increasingly
important for reasoning & query services defined on top of RDF and
OWL, and for the Semantic Web/Web 2.0 in general.
Extending binary OWL properties or RDF triples with a further
temporal argument either lead to additional objects or to reification,
as Welty et al. (2005) have shown.
We argue that temporal description logics (Lutz, 2004) are not
able to represent temporally-changing information, since they are
geared towards synchronic relationships, not diachronic ones.
In this paper, we critically discuss several well-known approaches
as presented in Welty et al. (2005), add a new one, and finally
reinterpret the OWL encoding of the 4D/perdurantist view.
The reinterpretation has several advantages and requires no rewriting
of an ontology that lacks a treatment of time.
We also suggest that practical OWL reasoning should support means for
temporal annotation of ABox relation instances.
The work discussed in this paper has been carried out in an
EU-funded project called MUSING (http://www.musing.eu) and has been
successfully applied to the PROTON upper-level ontology by equipping it
with a concept of time and for representing temporally-changing
relationships in MUSING.