Abstract
In almost all domains in practice, it is fundamental to properly represent entities amenable to changes. For instance, in business analytics, we must be able to reason with large amounts of time-changing KPI (key performance indicators) data. For this reason, general-purpose practical knowledge representation frameworks must be able to support the representation of temporally changing information and in a way that affords decidable automated reasoning. In this paper, we address the issue of representing entities amenable to intrinsic or extrinsic changes in OWL2. These sources of change are illustrated in a simplified model of the scholar domain. We then propose three strategies to represent entities amenable to changes as well as their changes. In particular, we do that by employing strategies that are based on a philosophical stance called perdurantism, which sees all individuals as 4D entities, i.e., as individuals that unfold in time as well as in space. Finally, we compare these three alternatives by generating synthetic instances and performing an empirical evaluation of reasoning tasks.