Tailoring Temporal Description Logics for Reasoning over Temporal Conceptual Models

Temporal data models have been used to describe how data can evolve in the context of temporal databases. Both the Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) model and the Unified Modelling Language (UML) have been temporally extended to design temporal databases. To automatically check quality properties of conceptual schemas various encoding to Description Logics (DLs) have been proposed in the literature. On the other hand, reasoning on temporally extended DLs turn out to be too complex for effective reasoning ranging from 2

ExpTime

up to undecidable languages. We propose here to temporalize the ‘light-weight’

DL-Lite

logics obtaining nice computational results while still being able to represent various constraints of temporal conceptual models. In particular, we consider temporal extensions of

$\ensuremath{\textsl{DL-Lite}_\textit{bool}}^\mathcal{N}$

, which was shown to be adequate for capturing non-temporal conceptual models without relationship inclusion, and its fragment

$\smash{\ensuremath{\textsl{DL-Lite}_\textit{core}}^\mathcal{N}}$

with most primitive concept inclusions, which are nevertheless enough to represent almost all types of atemporal constraints (apart from covering).