A knowledge server for reasoning about temporal constraints between classes and instances of events

Abstract

Abstract.Reasoning with temporal constraints is a ubiquitous issue in many computer science tasks, for which many dedicated approaches have been and are being built. In particular, in many areas, including planning, workflow, guidelines and protocol management, one needs to represent and reason with temporal constraints between classes of events (e.g., between the types of actions needed to achieve a goal) and temporal constraints between instances of events (e.g., between the specific actions being executed). The temporal constraints between the classes of events must be inherited by the instances, and the consistency of both types of constraints must be checked. In this paper, we design a general-purpose domain-independent knowledge server dealing with these issues. In particular, we propose a formalism to represent temporal constraints, and we point out two orthogonal parameters that affect the definition of reasoning algorithms operating on them. We then show four algorithms to deal with inheritance and to perform temporal consistency checking (depending on the parameters) and we study their properties. Finally, we report the results we obtained by applying our system to the treatment of temporal constraints in clinical guidelines.

Temporal detection and analysis of guideline interactions

“…Thus, the problem of checking whether a specific execution of a CIG satisfies the temporal constraints of a CIG corresponds to checking whether the temporal constraints of the instances satisfy the temporal constraints of the classes. This problem has been dealt with in [38]. In that work, the authors have considered the problem of "inheriting" the temporal constraints from classes of events to instances of events.…”

Capturing Telic/Atelic Temporal Data Semantics: Generalizing Conventional Conceptual Models

“…In particular, temporal constraint propagation (see, e.g., the survey in [4]) can be used in order to check the overall consistency of the constraints in the schema. Additionally, advanced temporal reasoning techniques can be used in order to check that the valid time of data in the database is consistent with the constraints in the annotated schema (see, e.g., [63]). …”

Temporal reasoning about composite and/or periodic events

“…We also proposed an initial algorithm to check the consistency of a knowledge base of such constraints with a set of instances of events exactly located in time (Terenziani 2000). Afterwards, we started to approach the problem of integrating both qualitative and quantitative constraints between classes and instances of events in a more general perspective, but not supporting periodic and composite events (Terenziani 2002, Terenziani andAnselma 2004), and proposed an initial approach to cope with qualitative and quantitative and periodic repetition constraints between classes of events in clinical guidelines (Terenziani et al 2002a, b, Terenziani and.…”