On the Representation of Temporally Changing Information in OWL

An important challenge in the Knowledge Representation area is on representing and reasoning over temporally changing information. Particularly, a number of authors have been investigating approaches to extend the expressivity beyond what is currently supported by the DL (Description Logics) based languages in order to address this issue, while maintaining compatibility with subclasses of DLs adopted in the Semantic Web. This is mainly due to the increasing popularity of the Semantic Web initiative as well as the role played by DL in that context. In this paper we defend the need of a higher-level foundational framework based on results coming from the discipline of Formal Ontology. We present two complementary proposals for modeling temporally changing information in OWL, based on the most discussed strategy in the literature to address this problem, namely, the use of a perdurantist (or 4D) view of domain entities. Moreover we compare the results with some related work and discuss its limitations and further improvements.