Ontologies of Time and Events
Jerry R. Hobbs
(Information Sciences Institute,
University of Southern California)
In this talk I will describe two ontology-building efforts. The
first, OWL-Time, has been developed with the intent of having it be a
broadly shared ontolgy of time for the Semantic Web. It covers the
topological properties of time, such as the "before" relation and the
relations in Allen's interval calculus; measures of duration; clock
and calendar concepts; temporal granularity; temporal aggregates, and
temporal arithmetic. I'll also talk about discovering the implicit
temporal information in event descriptions.
The second ontology is ontology of event structure, as exemplified in
two projects, one to develop the Video Event Representation Language
(VERL) for describing primitive and complex actions and events in
video data, and the other to develop a representation for translating
among the various leading representation schemes for representing
complex events. The aim is to provide the vocabulary for linking up
structural and functional descriptions of events.