On the Expressivity and Complexity of Temporal Conceptual Modelling

The contribution of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it introduces T DLR, a novel temporal logic for temporal conceptual modelling, motivated as the obvious generalisation of the successful DLR Description Logic. Tight decidability and complexity results are proved for T DLR and the monodic fragment of it (T DLR ). Moreover, the decidability of conjunctive query containment under T DLR constraints is proved. On the other hand, the paper provides a formal semantic characterisation of all the important temporal conceptual modelling constructs (for valid time representation) as found in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic formalisation of the constructs present in most temporal conceptual modelling systems. This systematic characterisation as T DLR theories is an evidence of the adequacy of the T DLR temporal Description Logic for temporal conceptual modelling.