An Enhanced OWL-Time Ontology for Complex Recurring Temporal Patterns

The effective representation of temporal information across various domains using semantic web specifications is crucial for enabling temporal reasoning and facilitating time-oriented queries. However, existing temporal ontologies often lack consistency in time representation within a single ontology and are typically tailored to specific domains, limiting their applicability to complex temporal information. Notably, prominent frameworks like OWL-Time frequently overlook the intricacies of complex recurring temporal features. To address this limitation within OWL-Time, this study introduces OWL-BOLA 1.0, an extension specifically engineered to enhance OWL-Time for handling complex recurring temporal patterns. The aim of this study is to augment OWL-Time with specialized concepts and properties using a lightweight approach suited for recurring time, enabling a more comprehensive representation of temporal knowledge and enhancing reasoning capabilities. The objective is to provide robust support for handling recurring temporal patterns within OWL-Time constructs, thus enabling the reasoning of both simple and complex recurring temporal patterns. The methodology utilized in this study involves extending OWL-Time by integrating additional concepts and properties that cater to recurring temporal features. This approach ensures a more explicit representation of temporal knowledge while maintaining the lightweight nature of the ontology. The evaluation of the proposed ontology is carried out by analyzing metrics such as the depth of class hierarchy and inheritance richness. The results demonstrate the efficacy of OWL-BOLA 1.0 in providing explicit representation and handling complex recurring temporal patterns. The ontology exhibits a depth of class hierarchy of 6 and a high inheritance richness of 0.915, highlighting its impressive performance and utility compared to existing ontologies. Although it shows slightly lower semantic richness (0.466) and data property richness (0.237) in conceptualization, OWL-BOLA 1.0 effectively reduces redundancy and maintains clarity. In conclusion, OWL-BOLA 1.0 offers a balanced and effective tool for various application domains by enhancing OWL-Time's capability to handle complex recurring temporal patterns. This study contributes to the field by providing a robust solution for temporal reasoning, making it applicable across diverse domains requiring sophisticated temporal information representation.