Adding Temporal Dimension to Ontologies via OWL Reification

It has been pointed out recently by many researchers that it is difficult for languages such as OWL to incorporate time in their relations. As a result it is difficult to reason about the temporal ordering of events or about the temporal properties of relations that vary as a function of time. There are a number of methods that have been proposed in order to circumvent this difficulty. One technique that can be used for this purpose is reification. The advantage of this approach is that it does not require the introduction of additional constructs to the OWL language. In this work we investigate the types of queries that are possible with this mechanism and we conclude that is in fact possible to express many interesting and useful queries. Moreover, due to the use of standard OWL, existing reasoning tools are capable of handling these queries.