Formalizing Temporal Constraints on Part-Whole Relations.

Representing part-whole relations and effectively using them in domain ontologies and conceptual data mod- els poses multiple challenges. In this paper we face the issue of imposing temporal constraints on part-whole relationships, introducing a way to account for essen- tial and immutable parts (and wholes) in addition to the usual mandatory parts (and wholes). Our approach is based on i) an explicit temporalization of the part-whole relation, which allows us to introduce a novel notion of status for part-whole relationships; ii) an explicit ac- count of the ontological nature of the classes involved in a part-whole relationships, which distinguishes be- tween rigid and anti-rigid classes. The main novelty in this paper is to resort to a temporal logic approach to capture the above mentioned notions. The formalization proposed here is grounded on the temporal description logic DLRUS and is based on previous succe