HuTO: an Human Time Ontology for Semantic Web Applications

TL;DR

HuTO is an RDFS ontology designed to annotate and reason about complex temporal data in the Semantic Web, enabling better interpretation and querying of diverse temporal phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces modeling of non-convex intervals and incorporates normalization and reasoning rules for improved temporal data handling.

Findings

Supports complex temporal queries with non-convex intervals

Enables explicit reasoning about temporal information

Facilitates temporal-aware information retrieval

Abstract

The temporal phenomena have many facets that are studied by different communities. In Semantic Web, large heterogeneous data are handled and produced. These data often have informal, semi-formal or formal temporal information which must be interpreted by software agents. In this paper we present Human Time Ontology (HuTO) an RDFS ontology to annotate and represent temporal data. A major contribution of HuTO is the modeling of non-convex intervals giving the ability to write queries for this kind of interval. HuTO also incorporates normalization and reasoning rules to explicit certain information. HuTO also proposes an approach which associates a temporal dimension to the knowledge base content. This facilitates information retrieval by considering or not the temporal aspect.