An Activity-Based Ontology for Dates

The representation of dates and their relationship to time and duration has long been recognized as an important problem in commonsense reasoning. However, existing date ontologies, such as OWL-Time and Date-Time Foundation Vocabulary from the Object Modeling Group, take either over-simplistic or convoluted approaches to defining the key semantics for dates. We show that such approaches are inadequate and provide an improved solution: a first-order Date Ontology that is an extension of the Process Specification Language and an existing duration ontology. Rather than treat dates as a class of timepoints, we axiomatize dates as a class of complex activities which have multiple periodic occurrences. We consider two modules of the Date Ontology, and characterize the models of the Date Ontology up to elementary equivalence.