Publication
A Temporal Extension of the Hayes/ter Horst Entailment Rules and an Alternative to W3C's N-ary Relations
Hans-Ulrich Krieger
In: 7th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems. International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2012), 7th, July 24-27, Graz, Austria, IOS Press, 2012.
Abstract
Temporal encoding schemes using RDF and OWL are often plagued by a
massive proliferation of useless "container" objects.
Reasoning and querying with such representations is extremely complex,
expensive, and error-prone.
We present a temporal extension of the Hayes and ter Horst entailment
rules for RDFS (Hayes, 2004) and OWL (ter Horst, 2005) which apply to the
TBox, RBox, and ABox of an ontology in order to make implicit knowledge
explicit.
The extension requires only some lightweight forms of reasoning and
is realized by adding two further temporal arguments, thus replacing a
triple by a quintuple.
The approach has been implemented in the forward chaining engine HFC.
Our decision was motivated by experiences we have gained in former
projects that have dealt with the representation of changing information
over time in description logic ontologies.
In order to verify the superiority of the approach, we compare the
quintuple-based approach with a semantic-preserving encoding scheme for
N-ary relations in RDF triples, as proposed by the Semantic Web Best
Practices Group of the W3C.
The comparison is carried out on a theoretical as well as on a practical
level, both in the space and the time domain when computing the deductive
closure w.r.t. the triple- and quintuple-based temporal entailment rules.