RESEARCH ON TEMPORAL OPERATORS AND APPLICATIONS OF TEMPORAL ONTOLOGY

Ontology, as a knowledge representation approach, continues to evolve over time as the domain develops. It is of particular importance when introducing ontologies into the information integration field, to eliminate semantic conflicts brought about by changes along the time axis. This paper first introduces a temporal ontology model which can be used to express and deal with time related information, then defines a set of rich query operators and a basic reasoning operator. Further, a prototype Temporal Ontology Management System (TOMS) enhanced with the above operators is applied to an information integration background with temporal semantic conflicts. Testing shows that TOMS is both capable of managing temporal ontologies and supporting temporal queries and basic reasoning.