Transition Constraints for Temporal Attributes

ABSTRACT. Representing temporal data in conceptual data models and ontologies is required by various application domains, and for it to be useful for modelling precision and useful with automated reasoners, a language that is expressive enough to capture the required operational semantics of the time-varying information is essential. 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 axiomatization of fully temporized attributes is possible with a minor extension to the already very expressive description logic language DLRUS . We formalize 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.