Title: Temporal optimisations and temporal cardinality in the tOWL language

Authors: Viorel Milea; Flavius Frasincar; Uzay Kaymak; Geert-Jan Houben

Addresses: Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ' Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ' Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands; School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. ' Web Information Systems Group, Software Technology Department, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands

Abstract: The tOWL language is a temporal web ontology language based on OWL-DL without nominals. The language enables the representation of time and time-related aspects, such as state transitions. The design choices of the language pose new challenges from a temporal perspective. One such challenge is the representation of temporal cardinality. Another challenge consists of optimising the temporal representations in order to reduce the number of axioms. One such optimisation is temporal coalescing, which merges concepts that are associated with time intervals that either meet or share at least one instant with each other. In this paper we formally introduce these concepts into the tOWL language and illustrate how they can be applied.

Keywords: tOWL language; temporal coalescing; temporal cardinality; temporal web ontology.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2012.045765

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2012 Vol.7 No.1, pp.45 - 64

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

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