Temporalising OWL 2 QL

We design a temporal description logic, TQL, that extends the standard ontology language OWL2QL, provides basic means for temporal conceptual modelling and ensures first-order rewritability of conjunctive queries for suitably defined data instances with validity time

Tractable interval temporal propositional and description logics

We design a tractable Horn fragment of the Halpern-Shaham temporal logic and extend it to interval-based temporal description logics, instance checking in which is P-complete for both combined and data complexity

On metric temporal description logics

We introduce metric temporal description logics (mTDLs) as combinations of the classical description logic ALC with (a) LTLbin, an extension of the temporal logic LTL with succinctly represented intervals, and (b) metric temporal logic MTL, extending LTLbin with capabilities to quantitatively reason about time delays. Our main contributions are algorithms and tight complexity bounds for the satisfiability problem in these mTDLs: For mTDLs based on (fragments of) LTLbin, we establish complexity bounds ranging from EXPTIME to 2EXPSPACE. For mTDLs based on (fragments of) MTL interpreted over the naturals, we establish complexity bounds ranging from EXPSPACE to 2EXPSPACE

What the past holds in store: an anthropological study of temporality in a southern French village

This thesis examines the diverse and conflicting ways in which the past is invoked in a village in the coastal area of the Aude department, in the Languedoc region of Southern France. The region of Languedoc has been undergoing turbulent, and unpredictable socio-economic change since the development of viticultural capitalism in the 19th century, and since the 1960s has also witnessed the development of a sizeable tourist industry. These factors, along with the proximity of the village to the city of Narbonne, have led over the past 150 years to the creation of a heterogeneous village population. The thesis details the plurality of ways in which the past was temporalised in the village during the fieldwork period (1996-7), taking account of the various social groups present in the village, and their economic activities and life worlds. It also illustrates the relationship between local temporalities and wider socio-economic developments in the region, in particular in relation to the development of a tourist industry that transforms the past into a commodity. The thesis is partly concerned to assess the relationship between these wider socio-economic developments, and the sociality of the village inhabitants. Drawing on recent anthropological work on time, human temporality is viewed as the product of symbolic processes, through which agents make evident, and act upon, the inherently temporal character of existence. In this sense the apprehension and significance of the past is implicated in a dynamic with present action and future orientations, and interpreted accordingly. However, a 'culturalist' perspective is avoided in the thesis by foregrounding the importance of interpreting all human activity as both historically situated, and implicated in wider political economic processes. In this respect, the thesis also pays attention to issues of political economy, and attempts a partial synthesis of different anthropological approaches: the phenomenological, the symbolic, and the materialist

A cookbook for temporal conceptual data modelling with description logic

We design temporal description logics suitable for reasoning about temporal conceptual data models and investigate their computational complexity. Our formalisms are based on DL-Lite logics with three types of concept inclusions (ranging from atomic concept inclusions and disjointness to the full Booleans), as well as cardinality constraints and role inclusions. In the temporal dimension, they capture future and past temporal operators on concepts, flexible and rigid roles, the operators `always' and `some time' on roles, data assertions for particular moments of time and global concept inclusions. The logics are interpreted over the Cartesian products of object domains and the flow of time (Z,<), satisfying the constant domain assumption. We prove that the most expressive of our temporal description logics (which can capture lifespan cardinalities and either qualitative or quantitative evolution constraints) turn out to be undecidable. However, by omitting some of the temporal operators on concepts/roles or by restricting the form of concept inclusions we obtain logics whose complexity ranges between PSpace and NLogSpace. These positive results were obtained by reduction to various clausal fragments of propositional temporal logic, which opens a way to employ propositional or first-order temporal provers for reasoning about temporal data models

Metric Temporal Description Logics with Interval-Rigid Names: Extended Version

In contrast to qualitative linear temporal logics, which can be used to state that some property will eventually be satisfied, metric temporal logics allow to formulate constraints on how long it may take until the property is satisfied. While most of the work on combining Description Logics (DLs) with temporal logics has concentrated on qualitative temporal logics, there has recently been a growing interest in extending this work to the quantitative case. In this paper, we complement existing results on the combination of DLs with metric temporal logics over the natural numbers by introducing interval-rigid names. This allows to state that elements in the extension of certain names stay in this extension for at least some specified amount of time

Waiting in vain? Metaphysics, modernity and music in the work of T. W. Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Luigi Nona

This work enters into debates about about the meaning and significance of messianism in the Anglophone context of 'continental philosophy'. It does so by investigating the work of two traditionally opposed German philosophers, T. W. Adorno and Martin Heidegger. These figures stand behind the alternative traditions of recent philosophical messianism: historical materialist and neo-Heideggerian, or post-Hegelian and anti-Hegelian. Where the former tradition classically proposes the possibility of progress in, or towards history, without clearly questioning the metaphysical grounds of this possibility, the latter tradition questions the ontological nature of grounding itself, but often at the price of forfeiting a concept of historical change. The tum to messianism within historical materialism, inspired by Walter Benjamin, involves an attempt to give an account of these grounds. While sympathising with the motivation behind this tum, I suggest that it risks upholding a metaphysics that is equally as problematic as the one it opposes. I seek to interpret Adorno's late conception of an expression of 'waiting in vain' as a critique of historical materialist messianism. Since Adorno's idea is fragmentary, and still relies upon traditional metaphysics, it is read in relation to Heidegger's ontological account of waiting, according to his overall understanding of metaphysical modernity as a will to domination. The question of waiting connects the thought of Adorno and Heidegger - this has been understated in the secondary literature. I suggest that the connection is all the more convincing when their respective ideas of waiting are understood in relation to their philosophies of music and of 'the musical'. This theme is examined within a broader context of music and philosophy. It is pursued in order to respond to the overall problematic. A 'musical' concept of waiting can address some of the metaphysical problems encountered in a philosophy 'after' messianism, because it can propose an alternative notion of promise. The example of this expression is the music of Luigi Nono. A critical examination of his works is taken to elucidate the spatiotemporal character of an expression of waiting in vain, in a manner that both enriches and problematises the solely philosophical readings

Temporal Query Answering in EL

Context-aware systems use data about their environment for adaptation at runtime, e.g., for optimization of power consumption or user experience. Ontology-based data access (OBDA) can be used to support the interpretation of the usually large amounts of data. OBDA augments query answering in databases by dropping the closed-world assumption (i.e., the data is not assumed to be complete any more) and by including domain knowledge provided by an ontology. We focus on a recently proposed temporalized query language that allows to combine conjunctive queries with the operators of the well-known propositional temporal logic LTL. In particular, we investigate temporalized OBDA w.r.t. ontologies in the DL EL, which allows for efficient reasoning and has been successfully applied in practice. We study both data and combined complexity of the query entailment problem