Specifying temporal knowledge for workflows ontologies

A workflow is an automation of a process, in which participants (people or programs) are involved in activities for solving a set of tasks according to certain rules and constraints in order to attain a common goal. The concept of workflow appeared in business informatics. Currently the workflow techniques are used in many other fields such as medical informatics, bioinformatics, automation of scientific research, computer-aided design and manufacturing, etc. An ontology is a formal description (in terms of concepts, entities, their properties and relationships) of knowledge for solving a given class of problems. In particular, ontologies can be used in problems related to workflows. In this paper, we introduce a formalism that extends the language of the interval Allen’s logic, and show how this formalism can be applied to specify temporal knowledge in ontologies for workflows. For the extended Allen’s logic, we construct a deduction system based on the analytic tableaux method. We also show (by examples) how to apply the deduction method to query answering over ontologies written in the extended Allen’s logic.