Time ontology extended for non-Gregorian calendar applications

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Cox, Simon J.D.

Affiliations: CSIRO Land and Water, PO Box 56, Highett, Vic. 3190, Australia. E-mail: simon.cox@csiro.au

Abstract: We have extended OWL-Time to support the encoding of temporal position in a range of reference systems, in addition to the Gregorian calendar and conventional clock. Two alternative implementations are provided: as a pure extension or OWL-Time, or as a replacement, both of which preserve the same representation for the cases originally supported by OWL-Time. The combination of the generalized temporal position encoding and the temporal interval topology from OWL-Time support a range of applications in a variety of cultural and technical settings. These are illustrated with examples involving non-Gregorian calendars, Unix-time, and geologic time using both chronometric and stratigraphic timescales.

Keywords: Temporal reference system, calendar, temporal topology, ontology re-use

DOI: 10.3233/SW-150187

Journal: Semantic Web, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 201-209, 2016