Reified temporal logics: An overview (Q5939380)

The aim of the present paper is to overview the reified temporal logics, providing a careful analysis of certain representative existing systems that feature reified propositions. Section 2 of the paper examines and comments on some of the most important reified temporal formalisms introduced by D. V. McDermott (1982), J. F. Allen (1983, 1984), Y. Shoham (1987), H. Reichgelt (1989), and A. P. Galton (1990). The authors' approach, J. Ma and B. Knight (1996), which recasts various temporal ontologies in a general framework, is exposed in subsection 2.6 as a fully reified logic, with a clear syntax and precise semantics. Section 3 accounts for the arguments supporting the approach to temporal reification, some of the criticisms on temporal reification, pointing out that the merits of reified vs. non-reified logic may depend on the particular application involved. Section 4 shows that the temporal reified approach offers several distinct advantages from the point of view of expressiveness, in comparison to other approaches. Since reified logics have a special status to the time, they allow quantification over standard propositions, provide a higher expressiveness to represent general temporal knowledge, thus demonstrating to be more expressive with respect to: (1) classifying different types of temporal occurrence; (2) representing incompatibility and negation; (3) reasoning about event change and causality; and (4) representing temporal relationship between events and their effects.