DL-Lite and Interval Temporal Logics: a Marriage Proposal

Description logics of the DL-Lite family are widely used in knowledge representation because of their low computational complexity and rather good expressivity sufficient to capture important conceptual modeling constructs and the OWL2 QL profile of the Ontology Web Language (OWL). Recently, various point-based temporal extensions of DL-Lite have been investigated. Here, we propose to extend DL-Lite with fragments of Halpern and Shoham's interval logic of Allen's relations (HS). We formally define such extensions and show how they can be successfully used in knowledge representation. In the quest for a decidable logic, we discuss the challenges in combining decidable fragments of HS with DL-Llite.