The Ontology of Time
Formal Ontology for Knowledge Representation and Natural Language
Processing – ICT School Doctorate Course
May 3rd, 2005

Introduction
2 May 3rd, 2005

Time
An important philosophical domain of inquiry
A foundational ontology
An essential domain in Physics
An essential domain in Knowledge Representation and
Reasoning
A basic ingredient of linguistic statements
3 May 3rd, 2005

Which time?
Absolute or Relative?
Absolute: There is a purely temporal space in which
objects are temporally located.
Standard physics
DOLCE’s Time Quality Space
Relative: Time is an implicit structure induced by temporal
relations
Leibniz - Newton controversy
commonsense and psychological evidence
Which structure?
Whi