Ontology for temporal reasoning based on extended Allen's interval algebra

摘要

Aspects of time, change, evolution, temporal reasoning and decision-making remain in the focus of metadata and ontology engineering because many related challenges are yet to be fully addressed. In this paper, we present ontology ALLEN+ as a tool to reason with imperfect temporal information. We created a rule-set (SWRL on top of OWL) capable of temporal reasoning with partially incomplete and heterogeneous information. The ontology allows to have either quantitative, qualitative or hybrid information about temporal points and intervals, and the rules are capable of both ways transitions between different representations. We show how to use context of available imperfect temporal information to improve results of the composition operation of Allen's interval algebra, and we design rules for composition-in-context operation. We discover that additional context reduces the overall uncertainty of the composition and enables about 20% progress in overall quality of the composition and therefore in potential reasoning and decision-making.