Annotating semantic data with metadata is becoming more and more important to provide information about the statements being asserted. While initial solutions proposed a data model to represent a specific dimension of meta-information (such as time or provenance), the need for a general annotation framework which allows representing different context dimensions is needed. In this paper, we extend the 4dFluents ontology by Welty and Fikes---on associating temporal validity to statements---to any dimension of context, and discuss possible issues that multidimensional context representations have to face and how we address them.
In a later work @cite_4 , zamborlini_ontologically-founded_2013 focus on solving the issues of the prior approaches for representing events and properties of individuals. They maintain the fluent-like representation for events, but move to an N-ary representation (see below) for properties. However, they still not address the possibility to have more that one domain relation, nor address how inheritance is performed in OWL.
@cite_4
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An important challenge in the Knowledge Representation area is on representing and reasoning over temporally changing information. Particularly, a number of authors have been investigating approaches to extend the expressivity beyond what is currently supported by the DL (Description Logics) based languages in order to address this issue, while maintaining compatibility with subclasses of DLs adopted in the Semantic Web. This is mainly due to the increasing popularity of the Semantic Web initiative as well as the role played by DL in that context. In this paper we defend the need of a higher-level foundational framework based on results coming from the discipline of Formal Ontology. We present two complementary proposals for modeling temporally changing information in OWL, based on the most discussed strategy in the literature to address this problem, namely, the use of a perdurantist (or 4D) view of domain entities. Moreover we compare the results with some related work and discuss its limitations and further improvements.