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timeowlontology

Correct ontological relationship between "start" and "end"

I've been cataloguing usage of some common ontology properties in OWL, RDFS, DCMI Terms, SKOS, etc. A question was brought up about how to relate start/end properties to one another (such as "start time" and "end time". Schema.org and OWL-Time do not relate these to one another and Wikidata uses "complementary property" to relate them.

My understanding is that "start time" and "end time" are not true complements to one another, as true complements would be something like "meats" and "non-meats" (for use of the property owl:complementOf, for instance).

After looking around at other ontologies, I can't seem to find one which relates start/end times to one another. Is there an ontology that does so? What is the relationship they have to one another ontologically?

Solution

  • Some properties of the cidoc-crm ontology have build-in properties related to start and end of envents. It's simple and flat: all the cases have a specific property.
    These properties are:

    • P173 starts before or with the end of
    • P174 starts before the end of
    • P175 starts before or with the start of
    • P176 starts before the start of
    • P182 ends before or with the start of
    • P183 ends before the start of
    • P184 ends before or with the end of
    • P185 ends before the end of

    example example cidoc crm

    You'll find doc about them here: https://cidoc-crm.org/html/cidoc_crm_v7.1.2.html#P173