Temporal ER modeling with description logics

Abstract. Recent eorts in the Conceptual Modelling community have been devoted to properly capturing time-varying information. Various temporally enhanced Entity-Relationship (ER) models have been pro-posed that are intended to model the temporal aspects of database con-ceptual schemas. This work gives a logical formalisation of the various properties that characterise and extend dierent temporal ER models which are found in literature. The formalisation we propose is based on Description Logics (DL), which have been proved useful for a logical re-construction of the most popular conceptual data modelling formalisms. The proposed DL has the ability to express both enhanced temporal ER schemas and integrity constraints in the form of complex inclusion de-pendencies. Reasoning in the devised logic is decidable, thus allowing for automated deductions over the whole conceptual representation, which includes both the ER schema and the integrity constraints over it.