Transition constraints for temporal attributes

Abstract

Representing temporal data in conceptual data models and ontologies is required by various application domains. For it to be useful for modellers to represent the information precisely and reason over it, it is essential to have a language that is expressive enough to capture the required operational semantics of the time-varying information. Temporal modelling languages have little support for temporal attributes, if at all, yet attributes are a standard element in the widely used conceptual modelling languages such as EER and UML. This hiatus prevents one to utilise a complete temporal conceptual data model and keep track of evolving values of data and its interaction with temporal classes. A rich axiomatisation of fully temporised attributes is possible with a minor extension to the already very expressive description logic language DLRUS. We formalise the notion of transition of attributes, and their interaction with transition of classes. The transition specified for attributes are extension, evolution, and arbitrary quantitative extension.