Temporal classes and OWL
Natalya G. Keberle · 2009
Abstract. Temporal class as a design primitive for knowledge engineering allows for natural representation of evolving concepts of a domain. The paper proposes arguments to employ temporal entities (classes, axioms, ontologies) as first-class citizens in the Semantic Web applications. The paper presents an informal description of one temporal extension of a subset of OWL to deal with temporal classes — OWL-MeT, based on the combination of metric temporal logic and basic description logic with nominals, MT-ALCO. Described are the solutions proposed and the open issues of such a temporal extension. Introduction and Use Cases Temporal logics are successfully used for verification of the dynamic systems, e.g. in software and hardware development. Application of temporal logics to the Semantic Web applications is now limited due to the lack of standards on temporal ontology languages and of the reasoning support.