CHRONOS Ed: A tool for handling temporal ontologies in protégé

Representing information evolving in time in ontologies is a difficult problem to deal with. Temporal relations are in fact ternary (i.e., properties of objects that change in time involve also a temporal value in addition to the object and the subject) and cannot be handled directly by OWL. The standard solution to this problem is to map all temporal relations to a set of binary ones with new (intermediate) classes introduced by the temporal model applied. Nevertheless, ontologies then become complicated and difficult to handle by standard editors such as Prot�eg�e (e.g., property restrictions of temporal classes might refer to the new classes rather than to the classes on which they were meant to be de�ned). It also requires that the user be familiar with the peculiarities of the temporal representation. This is exactly the problem this work is dealing with. We introduce CHRONOS Ed, a plug-in for Prot�eg�e that enables handling of temporal ontologies in Prot�eg�e the same way static ontologies are handled. It is implemented as a Tab plug-in for Prot�eg�e and can be downloaded from the Web