NdFluents: An ontology for annotated statements with inference preservation

Abstract

RDF provides the means to publish, link, and consume heterogeneous information on the Web of Data, whereas OWL allows the construction of ontologies and inference of new information that is implicit in the data. Annotating RDF data with additional information, such as provenance, trustworthiness, or temporal validity is becoming more and more important in recent times; however, it is possible to natively represent only binary (or dyadic) relations between entities in RDF and OWL. While there are some approaches to represent metadata on RDF, they lose most of the reasoning power of OWL. In this paper we present an extension of Welty and Fikes’ 4dFluents ontology—on associating temporal validity to statements—to any number of dimensions, provide guidelines and design patterns to implement it on actual data, and compare its reasoning power with alternative representations.