We define formal notions of temporal domain and temporal database, and use them to survey a wide spectrum of temporal query languages. We distinguish between an abstract temporal database and its concrete representations, and accordingly between abstract and concrete temporal query languages. We also address the issue of incomplete temporal information. 1 Introduction A temporal database is a repository of temporal information. A temporal query language is any query language for temporal databases. In this paper we propose a formal notion of temporal database and use this notion in surveying a wide spectrum of temporal query languages. The need to store temporal information arises in many computer applications. Consider, for example, records of various kinds: financial [37], personnel, medical [98], or judicial. Also, monitoring data, e.g., in telecommunications network management [4] or process control, has often a temporal dimension. There has been a lot of research in temporal dat...

Combining knowledge representation and reasoning formalisms is an important and challenging task. It is important because non-trivial AI applications often comprise different aspects of the world, thus requiring suitable combinations of available formalisms modeling each of these aspects. It is challenging because the computational behavior of the resulting hybrids is often much worse than the behavior of their components. In this paper, we propose a new combination method which is computationally robust in the sense that the combination of decidable formalisms is again decidable, and which, nonetheless, allows non-trivial interactions between the combined components. The new method, called E-connection, is defined in terms of abstract description systems (ADSs), a common generalization of description logics, many logics of time and space, as well as modal and epistemic logics. The basic idea of E-connections is that the interpretation domains of n combined systems are disjoint, and that these domains are connected by means of n-ary ‘link relations. ’ We define several natural variants of E-connections and study in-depth the transfer of decidability from the component systems to their E-connections. Key words: description logics, temporal logics, spatial logics, combining logics, decidability.

A class of interval-based temporal languages for uniformly representing and reasoning about actions and plans is presented. Actions are represented by describing what is true while the action itself is occurring, and plans are constructed by temporally relating actions and world states. The temporal languages are members of the family of Description Logics, which are characterized by high expressivity combined with good computational properties. The subsumption problem for a class of temporal Description Logics is investigated and sound and complete decision procedures are given. The basic language TL-F is considered #rst: it is the composition of a temporal logic TL # able to express interval temporal networks # together with the non-temporal logic F # a Feature Description Logic. It is proven that subsumption in this language is an NP-complete problem. Then it is shown how to reason with the more expressive languages TLU-FU and TL-ALCF . The former adds disjunction both at...

Traditional rst order predicate logic is known to be designed for representing and manipulating static knowledge (e.g. mathematical theories). So are manyof its applications. Knowledge representation systems based on concept description logics are not exceptions.

The paper describes a graphical interval logic that is the foundation of a toolset supporting formal specification and verification of concurrent software systems. Experience has shown that most software engineers find standard temporal logics difficult to understand and to use. The objective of this work is to enable software engineers to specify and reason about temporal properties of concurrent systems more easily by providing them with a logic that has an intuitive graphical representation and with tools that support its use. To illustrate the use of the graphical logic, the paper provides some specifications for an elevator system and proves several properties of the specifications. The paper also describes the toolset and the implementation. 1 Introduction One of the great challenges facing today's software engineers is the development of correct programs for real applications. Recent advances in hardware reliability and fault tolerance technology can assure extremely lo...

In their simplest form, hybrid languages are propositional modal languages which can refer to states. They were introduced by Arthur Prior, the inventor of tense logic, and played an important role in his work: because they make reference to specic times possible, they remove the most serious obstacle to developing modal approaches to temporal representation and reasoning. However very little is known about the computational complexity of hybrid temporal logics. In this paper we analyze the complexity of the satisability problem of a number of hybrid temporal logics: the basic hybrid language over transitive frames; nominal tense logic over transitive frames, strict total orders, and transitive trees; nominal Until logic; and referential interval logic. We discuss the eects of including nominals, the @ operator, the somewhere modality E, and the dierence operator D. Adding nominals to tense logic leads for several frame{classes to an increase in complexity of the satisability pro...

This paper introduces a new logical formalism, intended for temporal conceptual modelling, as a natural combination of the well-known description logic DLR and point-based linear temporal logic with Since and Until. We define a query language (where queries are non-recursive Datalog programs and atoms are complex DLR US expressions) and investigate the problem of checking query containment under the constraints defined by DLR US conceptual schemas, as well as the problems of schema satisfiability and logical implication. Although it is shown that reasoning in full DLR US is undecidable, we identify the decidable (in a sense, maximal) fragment DLR - US by allowing applications of temporal operators to formulas and entities only (but not to relation expressions) . We obtain the following hierarchy of complexity results: (a) reasoning in DLR - US with atomic formulas is EXPTIME-complete, (b) satisfiability and logical implication of arbitrary DLR - US formulas is EXPSPACE-complete, and (c) the problem of checking query containment of non-recursive Datalog queries under DLR - US constraints is decidable in 2EXPTIME. 1 1

In applications dealing with ordered domains, the available data is frequently indefinite. While the domain is actually linearly ordered, only some of the order relations holding between points in the data are known. Thus, the data provides only a partial order, and query answering involves determining what holds under all the compatible linear orders. In this paper we study the complexity of evaluating queries in logical databases containing such indefinite information. We show that in this context queries are intractable even under the data complexity measure, but identify a number of PTIME sub-problems. Data complexity in the case of monadic predicates is one of these PTIME cases, but for disjunctive queries the proof is non-constructive, using well-quasi-order techniques. We also show that the query problem we study is equivalent to the problem of containment of conjunctive relational database queries containing inequalities. One of our results implies that the latter is \Pi p 2 ...

The notion of time is ubiquitous in any activity that requires intelligence. In particular, several important notions like change, causality, action are described in terms of time. Therefore, the representation of time and reasoning about time is of crucial importance for many Artificial Intelligence systems. Specifically during the last 10 years, it has been attracting the attention of many AI researchers. In this survey, the results of this work are analysed. Firstly, Temporal Reasoning is defined. Then, the most important representational issues which determine a Temporal Reasoning approach are introduced: the logical form on which the approach is based, the ontology (the units taken as primitives, the temporal relations, the algorithms that have been developed,. . . ) and the concepts related with reasoning about action (the representation of change, causality, action,. . . ). For each issue the different choices in the literature are discussed. 1 Introduction The notion of time i...

Artificial intelligence research falls roughly into two categories: formal and implementational. This division is not completely firm: there are implementational studies based on (formal or informal) theories (e.g., CYC, SOAR, OSCAR), and there are theories framed with an eye toward implementability (e.g., predicate circumscription). Nevertheless, formal /theoretical work tends to focus on very narrow problems (and even on very special cases of very narrow problems) while trying to get them "right" in a very strict sense, while implementational work tends to aim at fairly broad ranges of behavior but often at the expense of any kind of overall conceptually unifying framework that informs understanding. It is sometimes urged that this gap is intrinsic to the topic: intelligence is not a unitary thing for which there will be a unifying theory, but rather a "society" of subintelligences whose overall behavior cannot be reduced to useful characterizing and predictive principles.