Temporal Description Logics

This chapter will survey the temporal extensions of Description Logics. These formalisms give an emphasis to reasoning tasks such as satis ability, subsumption, classi cation, and instance recognition. The analysis will include the whole spectrum of approaches used within the Temporal Description Logics area: from the loosely coupled approaches { which comprise, for example, the enhancement of simple Description Logics with a constraint based mechanism { to the most principled ones { considering a combined semantics for the abstract and the temporal domains. We wil show how these latter approaches described shares many similarities with approaches based on modal temporal logics, since Description Logics share many features with modal logic.