Representing Temporal Knowledge in the Semantic Web: The Extended 4D Fluents Approach

Representing information that evolves in time in ontologies, as well as reasoning over static and dynamic ontologies are the areas of interest in this work. Building upon well established standards of the semantic Web and the 4D-fluents approach for representing the evolution of temporal information in ontologies, this work demonstrates how qualitative temporal relations that are common in natural language expressions (i.e., relations between time intervals like “before”, “after”, etc.) are represented in ontologies. Existing approaches allow for representations of temporal information, but do not support representation of qualitative relations and reasoning.