Representing the UFO-B foundational ontology of events in SROIQ

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of foundational ontologies, i.e., formal ontological theories in the philosophical sense, to provide a theoretically sound foundation for improving the theory and practice of conceptual modeling and knowledge representation. This paper addresses one particular foundational theory of events termed UFO-B, which has been successfully employed as a reference model for addressing problems from complex media management, enterprise architecture, software engineering, and modeling of events in petroleum exploration. Despite that, there is still no formalization of UFO-B in a decidable knowledge representation language that could support reasoning about complex events and event relations. We address this gap by proposing a number of alternative translations from UFO-B's original axiomatization (in first-order logic and in the Alloy formal language) to the description logic SROIQ, which is the formal underpinning of OWL 2 DL. Additionally, to support practical applications, we translated these SROIQ theories to OWL 2 DL TBoxes, which were validated by showing that all the intended models of UFO-B (the logical models of the UFO-B specification in Alloy) that we generated are consistent with these UFO-B TBoxes.