Identifying Objects Over Time with Description Logics

A fundamental requirement for cooperating agents is to agree on a selection of component values of objects that can be used for reliably communicating references to the objects, to function as their keys. In a distributed environment, such as the web, it is more likely that a choice of such values may have time limits on the duration of their ability to serve as keys, e.g., values denoting permissions, authorizations, service codes, mobile addresses and so on. In this paper, we consider how a Boolean complete description logic can be embellished with a concept constructor for dynamic or temporal forms of equality generating constraints we call temporal path functional dependencies. In particular, we introduce the description logic DLFDtemp, demonstrate how it can be used to capture and reason about temporal keys and functional dependencies for a hypothetical distributed hospital database, and prove that the general membership problem for DLFDtemp is EXPTIME-complete. The latter is acco...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: DLOG
• Authors: David Toman, Grant E. Weddell
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, Description Logic, DLOG 2008, Functional Dependencies, General Membership Problem