Perdurantist ontology for binary fluents in OWL
Chris Welty and Richard Fikes
International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006)
Baltimore, Maryland (USA), November 9-11, 2006
Abstract
A critical problem for practical KR is dealing with relationships that change over time. This problem is compounded by representation languages such as OWL that are biased towards binary relations; even when the relationships that vary with time are binary, the time the relationship holds typically requires a third argument. We discuss the standard approach to this problem, and contrast it to a new alternative based on a four-dimensionalist (perdurantist) ontology, which allows us to use more of the expressive power of description logics. The technique is usable in other logics as well.