by posing domain and range restrictions on certain
underspecified properties. It is worth noting that
across the ontologies, each property has been cross-
classified as being either synchronic, i.e., property in-
stances staying constant over time, or diachronic, i.e.,
changing over time (Krieger, 2010). This property
characteristic can be used, amongst other things, to
check the consistency of a temporal ABox or as a dis-
tinguishing mark in an entailment rule.
When we talk about an ontology here, we have
to make a distinction between information from the
TBox (terminological knowledge), RBox (general in-
formation about properties), and ABox (assertional
knowledge). The TBox and RBox of the PAL do-
main stays constant, i.e., will not change over time.
Only relation instances from the ABox might undergo
a temporal change, e.g., the weight of a child at cer-
tain times, but not the birthdate.
2.1 HFC
HFC is a bottom-up forward chainer and semantic
repository implemented in Java, comparable to popu-
lar systems such as Jena and OWLIM. HFC supports
RDFS and OWL reasoning
`
a la (Hayes, 2004) and (ter
Horst, 2005), but at the same time provides an ex-
pressive language for defining custom rules, involving
functional and relational variables, complex tests and
actions, and the replacement of triples in favour of tu-
ples of arbitrary length. The query language of HFC
implements a subset of SPARQL, but at the same time
provides powerful custom M:N aggregates, not avail-
able elsewhere. In PAL, we are using HFC to store
universal knowledge (TBox, RBox), to query time-
varying data (ABox), and to reason about temporal
change. This is explicated in detail in Section 3.
2.2 Upper
PAL makes use of a minimal and stripped-down up-
per ontology that we have originally developed for
the EU projects MUSING, MONNET, and TREND-
MINER (Krieger and Declerck, 2014), showing a
tri-partite division of the most general class Entity,
viz., upp:Abstract, upp:Happening, and upp:Physical.
Most notable for PAL is the upp:Happening rep-
resentation which distinguishes between atomic
upp:Situations and decomposable upp:Events, using
properties such as upp:startsWith, upp:continuesWith,
and upp:endsWith. This allows us to encode
PDL-like processes and makes it also possible to
define pre- and post-conditions. upp:Happenings
are upp:basedOn upp:Entitys, upp:leadsTo other
upp:Entitys, and upp:involves other upp:Agents.
2.3 DIT++
The DIT++ ontology is based on the taxonomy
of dialogue acts, defined by Harry Bunt and col-
leagues (Bunt et al., 2012). The DIT++ taxon-
omy is translated into a subclass hierarchy, led by
the most general class dial:DialogueAct. We have
taken over the general-purpose communicative func-
tions and parts of the dimension-specific communica-
tive functions. The former dimension involves di-
alogue acts, such as dial:Request, dial:Instruct, or
dial:AcceptSuggestion. The latter contains commu-
nicative acts which help to maintain a dialogue, by
indicating, e.g., dial:AlloFeedback or dial:Pausing.
dial:DialogueActs are equipped with several important
properties, such as dial:sender and dial:addressee. A
dialogue act furthermore incorporates the (shallow)
semantics of a natural language utterance through
property dial:frame. Property dial:follows records
the temporal succession of dialogue acts, whereas
dial:refersTo allows to refer back to previously intro-
duced dialogue acts (e.g., as used in indirect speech).
2.4 Time
The time ontology basically defines the classes
time:DiachronicProperty and time:SynchronicProper-
ty, making it possible to characterize OWL proper-
ties (via rdf:type) as being able to undergo a temporal
change or not (see Section 2), for instance
dom:birthdate rdf:type time:SynchronicProperty
dom:weight rdf:type time:DiachronicProperty
We have furthermore defined the property
time:assign to implement the concept of an impera-
tive, programming language variable that can change
over time and whose time series needs to be recorded.
Such functionality is used in PAL in the dialogue pro-
cessing module (see Section 4.1).
2.5 Logic
The representation of transaction time in Section 3
needs to talk about the truth (= >) and falsity (⊥) of
statements. For this, we make use of a logic ontol-
ogy which includes even more general polarity val-
ues, such as don’t know (?) and error (!), arranged in
a class subsumption hierarchy: ! v {>, ⊥} v ?.
2.6 Domain
The domain ontology defines concepts and rela-
tion which are relevant to the PAL domain, e.g.,
dom:Activity (playing a game, cooking, making a di-
ary entry), dom:Actor (child, family members, health
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