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tOWL: A Temporal Web Ontology Language

Profile image of Flavius FrasincarFlavius Frasincar

2000, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics)

https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCB.2011.2162582
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Abstract

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. In this paper, we present a temporal extension of the very expressive fragment SHIN (D) of the OWL-DL language resulting in the tOWL language. Through a layered approach we introduce three extensions: i) Concrete Domains, which allows the representation of restrictions using concrete domain binary predicates, ii) Temporal Representation, which introduces timepoints, relations between timepoints, intervals, and Allen's 13 interval relations into the language, and iii) TimeSlices/Fluents, which implements a perdurantist view on individuals and allows for the representation of complex temporal aspects, such as process state transitions. We illustrate the expressiveness of the newly introduced language by using an example from the financial domain.

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