Adventures in Interval Temporal Logics

Temporal reasoning plays a main role in many areas of computer science and artificial intelligence. In most cases, time points are assumed to be the basic ontological temporal entities. However, they are not suitable to properly reason about real-world events with an intrinsic duration. During this talk, we explore a different approach to temporal reasoning, based on the notion of time interval. The family of Interval Temporal Logics (ITL), including logical formalisms supporting interval-based temporal reasoning, is introduced, with a look at the philosophical and practical reasons behind its relvance for temporal reasoning. We summarize the problems that have been addressed in the last decade, with a special focus on satisfiability and expressiveness issues, and outline future research direction