A Chinese Time Ontology

Temporal knowledge representation and identification are crucial in many application areas, such as Semantic Web, knowledge sharing and reusing, and natural language processing. Building time ontologies has been viewed as a promising means to solve this task. However, practical time ontology is closely related with specific nations and cultures, though they may share a common part. In this paper, we present a Chinese time ontology for web services and knowledge systems which involve Chinese temporal entities and temporal properties. First we define a core component called the base time ontology. Upon this base time ontology, we build the other part of the Chinese time ontology, which includes temporal measurement and representation in Chinese specific ways, and transformation between temporal entities in the Chinese time ontology and the DAML time ontology. We argue that the base time ontology is not only a basic and integral part of the Chinese time ontology, but also a base for constructing other time ontologies as well.