Reasoning with enhanced Temporal Entity-Relationship Models (Preliminary Report)

Recent efforts in the Conceptual Modelling community have been devoted to properly capture time-varying information. Various temporally enhanced Entity-Relationship (ER) models have been proposed that are intended to model the temporal aspects of database conceptual schemas. This preliminary work gives a logical formalisation of the various properties that characterise and extend different temporal ER models which are found in literature. The formal language we propose is a member of the family of Description Logics (DL), which have been proved useful for a logical reconstruction of the most popular conceptual data modelling formalisms, including the (enhanced) ER model. The proposed DL has the ability to express both enhanced temporal ER schemas and Integrity Constraints (IC) in the form of general axioms imposed on the schema itself. The devised logic has a decidable reasoning problem, thus allowing for automated reasoning over the whole conceptual representation, which includes both the ER schema and the ICs over it.