Reasoning with enhanced temporal entity-relationship models

Recent efforts in the Conceptual Modelling community have been devoted to properly capturing time-varying information, and several proposals of temporally enhanced entity-relationship (ER) exist. The work gives a logical formalisation of the various properties that characterise and extend different temporal ER models which are found in literature. The formalisation we propose is based on description logics (DL), which have been proved useful for a logical reconstruction of the most popular conceptual data modelling formalisms. The proposed DL has the ability to express both enhanced temporal ER schemas and integrity constraints in the form of complex inclusion dependencies. Reasoning in the devised logic is decidable, thus allowing for automated deductions over the whole conceptual representation, which includes both the ER schema and the integrity constraints over it.