One major obstacle to provide better support for Web users is the fact that the meaning of the majority of Web content is not accessible to machines. If we want machines to understand Web content, machines and humans need to share knowledge about the real world, in other words, it is necessary to represent the world, or parts of it within the computer. To represent the world, it is desirable that such representation is as close to reality as possible to prevent that false assumptions are made about the world. If we want this to happen, we must be able to represent a very important aspect of the real world: time. Time is a very important aspect of human life. Many environments require a temporal awareness. One example of such an environment is the air traffic control. Each aircraft must follow a strict schedule to avoid any incident. Therefore, time should also be part of the real world representations. We present a study of the compatibility between the Temporal Web Ontology Language (towl) and the Web Ontology Language 2 (OWL 2), checking which tOWL structures are compatible with OWL 2 and which structures require modifications to maintain the decidability of the language. The tOWL language was developed for a fragment of the first version of OWL, some structures can not simply be added to OWL 2 since this could affect the decidability. This work also presents the algorithms for reasoning to deal with the changes made in the tOWL language. With these algorithms, we can check database consistency, perform semantic queries and get implicit knowledge, learning new facts regarding the database. We present a case study using a database of aircraft occurrences. A temporal ontology is built to represent plane accidents, due to the ability of the tOWL language to deal with temporal aspects, we can connect each occurrence to the period in which it occurred, and we may analyze events, finding patterns and connecting information with other databases.
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