Temporalising EL Concepts with Time Intervals

We design and investigate a new interval based temporal description logic, ELλ, which is based on an Annotated Logic introduced by Kifer, AL, and motivated by life-science applications. We show how a subset of the logic can be captured as the EL fragment of AL, ELAL, and then go on to show how we can extend this representation to capture further temporal entailments. We show that both ELAL and ELλ maintain the same tractable complexity bounds for reasoning as EL and finally provide an example of how the logic can be utilised for the Drosophila developmental ontology.