OWL can be reasoned by software to verify the con-
sistence of the knowledge base and to find new im-
plicit knowledge (Hitzler et al., 2009a).
The basic concepts of OWL are:
• Axioms: Basic expression declarations that can
be true or false. A set of declarations can be con-
sistent when all declarations are true in the same
situation, or inconsistent when it is not possible
to find such situation. The reasoners (Sirin et al.,
2007; Shearer et al., 2008) are tools for OWL that
can automatically compute if a declaration is con-
sequence of others.
• Entities: Elements used to refer to real world ob-
jects (Group et al., 2009). They are atomic con-
cepts of declarations, such as, objects, categories,
relationships, etc. OWL objects are treated as in-
dividuals, categories are treated as classes and re-
lationship are treated as properties. The properties
are divided in object properties, datatype proper-
ties and annotation properties.
• Expressions: Combinations of entities to form
complex descriptions from basic elements. We
can combine entities names into expressions us-
ing constructors. For example, the atomic classes
“animal” and “mammal” can be combined to de-
scribe classes of animals that are mammals. This
new class would be represented in OWL by a class
expression, that could be used in declarations or in
other expressions.
2.3 tOWL
The tOWL (Milea et al., 2012) (Temporal Web Ontol-
ogy Language) is an OWL extension that allows the
communication between machines in contexts includ-
ing temporal information. The tOWL language allows
inferences of implicit knowledge in contexts that need
temporality when a temporal dimension is involved.
This language was developed as an extension of
OWL DL (Motik et al., 2009a), a profile from the first
version of OWL, with addition of the time unit. The
OWL DL fragment considered was S H I N pDq, i.e.,
OWL without the use of nominals, refereed as OWL
DL
´
.
The tOWL implements two aspects of time: tem-
poral infrastructure and change. Temporal infrastruc-
ture refers to the representation of time as intervals or
instants.
Using tOWL, changes can happen in values of
concrete attributes, in relationship between entities
and in transition of states.
The language was developed in three layers: (i)
Layer of Concrete Domains, (ii) Layer of Temporal
Reference and (iii) Layer of 4D Fluents.
2.3.1 Layer of Concrete Domains
This layer allows representation of restrictions using
binary predicates from concrete domains. In tOWL
we can represent feature chains, f
1
... f
n
, composed
with a concrete feature g, creating a concrete feature
path (CFP), which is equivalent to the following com-
position:
f
1
˝ f
2
˝ ... f
n
˝ g, (4)
where n P N. The CFP is added to tOWL as the
construct ConcreteFeatureChain. One example of
such composition would be the abstract feature time
composed with the concrete feature start, in the fol-
lowing manner:
time ˝ start. (5)
This construction denotes the beginning of a point
in an interval. Table 1 summarizes the semantics in-
troduced for this layer, with the abstract syntax pro-
posed for the tOWL constructs.
2.3.2 Layer of Temporal Reference
This layer presents timepoints, relationships between
timespoints and intervals. The intervals are defined
using the predicate of concrete domain ă and two
concrete features, start and end, to define that the
beginning of an interval must be strictly smaller than
the end of the interval, as described in Eq.6.
ProperInterval ” Dpbegin, endq. ă (6)
2.3.3 Layer of 4D Fluents
This layer presents a perdurantist view of individuals,
allowing representation of complex temporal aspects,
as state transitions in processes. Table 2 presents the
axioms of TBox corresponding to the timeslices/flu-
ents layer.
The language tOWL is limited in expressiveness
compared to OWL 2. It is based on the frag-
ment S H I N pDq while OWL 2 uses the fragment
SR OI Q . Thus, several constructs that are available
for OWL 2 cannot be used with tOWL.
One of the main innovations of OWL 2 is the ad-
dition of qualified cardinality restriction (Grau et al.,
2008a). With this construct we can represent sen-
tences such as “this airplane has 108 seats of the type
economic class and 48 seats of the type first class”.
That means we can add not only cardinality to prop-
erties, we can also qualify it, this is not possible in
tOWL and it is fundamental for the development of
several ontologies (Horrocks et al., 2006).
Towards a Temporal Extension to OWL 2: A Study based on tOWL Language
229