Abstract
We introduce TOQL, a query language for querying time information in ontologies. TOQL is a high level query language that handles ontologies almost like relational databases. Queries are issued as SQL-like statements involving time (i.e., time points or intervals) or high-level ontology concepts that vary in time. Although independent from TOQL, this work suggests a mechanism for representing time evolving concepts in ontologies based on the four-dimensional perdurantist mechanism. However, TOQL prevents users from being familiar with the representation of time in ontologies. To show proof of concept, an application has been developed that supports translation and execution of TOQL queries on temporal ontologies combined with a reasoning mechanism based on event calculus. A real world temporal ontology is also implemented on which several TOQL example queries are processed and discussed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aduna, B.V.: The SeRQL query language. User Guide for Sesame 2.1, Chapter 9, 2002–2008, http://www.openrdf.org/doc/sesame2/2.1.2/users/ch09.html
Allen, J.F., Ferguson, G.: Actions and Events in Interval Temporal Logic. Journal of Logic and Computation 4(5), 531–579 (1994)
Baratis, E.: TOQL: Querying Temporal Information in Ontologies. Master’s thesis, Techn. Univ. of Crete (TUC), Dept. of Electronic and Comp. Engineering (July 2008)
Bohlen, M.H., Jensen, C.S.: Seamless Integration of Time into SQL. Technical Report R-96-49, Dept. of Comp. Science, Aalborg University (1996)
Martin, D., et al.: OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. W3C Recommendation (November 2004), http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S
Hobbs, J.R., Fang, P.: Time Ontology in OWL. W3C Recommendation (September 2006), http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/
Karvounarakis, G., Alexaki, S., Christophides, V., Plexousakis, D., Scholl, M.: RQL: A Declarative Query Language for RDF. In: Intern. Conf. on World Wide Web (WWW 2002), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (May 2002)
Klein, M., Fensel, D.: Ontology Versioning for the Semantic Web. In: International Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS 2001), California, USA, July-August 2001, pp. 75–92 (2001)
Kline, N., Snodgrass, R.T., Cliff Leung, T.Y.: Aggregates. In: The TSQL2 Temporal Query Language, pp. 393–424. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1995)
McGuinness, D.L., VanHarmelen, F.: OWL Web Ontology Language Overview. W3C Recommendation (February 2004), http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features
Prud’hommeaux, E., Seaborne, A.: SPARQL Query Language for RDF. W3C Recommendation (January 2008), http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query
Seaborne, A.: RDQL - A Query Language for RDF. W3C Recommendation (January 2004), http://www.w3.org/Submission/2004/SUBM-RDQL-20040109
Sider, T.: Four-Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time. Oxford University Press, USA (2002)
Snodgrass, R.T.: The temporal query language TQuel. ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 12(2), 247–298 (1987)
Welty, C., Fikes, R.: A Reusable Ontology for Fluents in OWL. Fontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications 150, 226–236 (2006)
Welty, C., Fikes, R., Makarios, S.: A Reusable Ontology for Fluents in OWL. Technical Report RC23755 (Wo510-142), IBM Research Division, T. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY (October 2005)
Zhang, Z.: Ontology Query Languages: A Performance Evaluation. Master’s thesis, The University of Georgia, Comp. Science Dept. (August 2005)
Ozsoyglu, G., Snodgrass, R.T.: Temporal and Real-Time Databases: A Survey. Knowledge and Data Engineering 4, 513–532 (1995)
Gregersen, H., Jensen, C.S.: Temporal Entity Relationship Models – A Survey. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 3, 464–497 (1999)
Artale, A., Franconi, E.: A survey of temporal extensions of description logics. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 30(1-4) (2001)
Lutz, C., Wolter, F., Zakharyaschev, M.: Temporal description logics: A survey. In: Proc. TIME 2008. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2008)
Shanahan, M.: The event calculus explained. In: Wooldridge, M., Veloso, M. (eds.) Artificial Intelligence Today. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 1600, pp. 409–430. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Baratis, E., Petrakis, E.G.M., Batsakis, S., Maris, N., Papadakis, N. (2009). TOQL: Temporal Ontology Querying Language. In: Mamoulis, N., Seidl, T., Pedersen, T.B., Torp, K., Assent, I. (eds) Advances in Spatial and Temporal Databases. SSTD 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5644. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02982-0_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02982-0_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02981-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02982-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)