“TimeOntoImperfection”: An OWL 2 ontology to representing temporal data imperfection using imperfection theories

Abstract

Dealing with temporal data imperfection is a crucial issue in several application domains. In fact, failure to handle these imperfections can have significant consequences and lead to incorrect analysis and decision-making. This is particularly true when handling imperfect temporal data inputs in applications for Alzheimer’s patients as a real example. In this context, there is a need for a global ontology that provides a semantic representation of temporal data imperfection. In the literature, there is a big number of ontologies that represent data. Some represent only perfect temporal data. Some others represent imperfect data but not temporal ones. To the best of our knowledge, there is no ontology that represents temporal data imperfection. In this paper, we represent “TimeOntoImperfection”, a usable global ontology that represents four types of imperfection: imprecision, uncertainty, both uncertainty and imprecision and conflict. We describe the structure of “TimeOntoImperfection”, then we conduct a case a study in which we illustrate the usefulness of our ontology. Finally, we introduce the validation part in the context of CAPTAIN MEMO - an ontology based memory prothesis dedicated to alzheimer patients- and we discuss the encouraging results derived from the evaluation step.