GMEOW Temporal — intervals, instants, temporal frames, time-scoped relations

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/temporal
• Tier: core
• Group: core

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 113 terms and contributes 92 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/kernel
• gmeow:slices/profiles

Consumers

• Every slice carrying time-scoped facts (tenures, residences, validity); the statement layer's validFrom/validUntil; the calendar slice; the mail corpus.

Local Map

Examples

Intervals And Frames

• Source: slices/core/temporal/examples/intervals-and-frames.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:Instant, gmeow:TimeInterval, gmeow:hasEndInstant, gmeow:hasStartInstant, gmeow:hasTemporalFrame, gmeow:inTemporalFrame, gmeow:instantValue, gmeow:intervalMeets, gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian, gmeow:temporalFrameUTCHebrew
• External prefixes: xsd

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: time under explicit frames. Every crisp Instant is
# asserted relative to a TemporalFrame (Principle 11) — a bare "10:00:00Z" is
# ill-formed without saying which time scale and calendar interpret it. Two
# intervals (a conference talk and its Q&A) are built from begin/end Instants and
# related by an Allen relation (the talk is intervalBefore the Q&A). A third
# instant, the same wall-clock moment expressed in the Hebrew-calendar civil
# frame, shows that the frame — not the literal — carries the calendar.
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/temporal/> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

# --- The talk interval: begin and end Instants, each in the UTC/Gregorian frame.
ex:talkStart a gmeow:Instant ;
    gmeow:instantValue "2026-09-14T13:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:inTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian .

ex:talkEnd a gmeow:Instant ;
    gmeow:instantValue "2026-09-14T13:45:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:inTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian .

ex:talkInterval a gmeow:TimeInterval ;
    gmeow:hasStartInstant ex:talkStart ;
    gmeow:hasEndInstant ex:talkEnd ;
    gmeow:hasTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian .

# --- The Q&A interval, immediately after.
ex:qaStart a gmeow:Instant ;
    gmeow:instantValue "2026-09-14T13:45:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:inTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian .

ex:qaEnd a gmeow:Instant ;
    gmeow:instantValue "2026-09-14T14:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:inTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian .

ex:qaInterval a gmeow:TimeInterval ;
    gmeow:hasStartInstant ex:qaStart ;
    gmeow:hasEndInstant ex:qaEnd ;
    gmeow:hasTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian .

# --- Allen relation: the talk's end instant is exactly the Q&A's start instant
#     (13:45:00Z), so they MEET — adjacency, not Allen "before" (which would need
#     a gap between them).
ex:talkInterval gmeow:intervalMeets ex:qaInterval .

# --- The SAME wall-clock moment as the talk's start, but read in the Hebrew
#     civil-time frame: identical instant value, different interpreting frame —
#     the frame, not the literal, names the calendar (P11).
ex:talkStartHebrew a gmeow:Instant ;
    gmeow:instantValue "2026-09-14T13:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:inTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCHebrew .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 92
• Projection profiles: ical, owl-time, resume, schema-org, schema-org-schedule
• External vocabularies: crm, crmgeo, dcterms, edtf, gts, ical, ivoa, periodo, prov, rdf, schema, time, wd

Guide

Temporal — intervals, instants, frames, and time-scoped facts

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/temporal · tier: core The cross-cutting temporal facility: every slice that says when says it here.

Most vocabularies treat time as a literal: dateOfBirth "1972-03-01". GMEOW treats a temporal value the way it treats every value — frame-relative (Principle 11: a date is meaningless without its calendar and timescale), attributed (a date is usually a claim about when something happened), and structural (intervals relate to each other by topology — the Allen algebra — independent of any frame). This slice provides the four layers that follow from that stance:

1. Structure — intervals and instants, related by Allen relations.
2. Frame — the TemporalFrame (calendar + timescale + reference position) every temporal value is read in.
3. Claim — temporal measurements (a dated claim with method, uncertainty, and determinacy — radiocarbon dates and "circa" both live here, honestly).
4. Scope — the statement-layer clocks (validFrom/validUntil/assertedAt/ recordedNoLaterThan) that any fact in any slice can carry.

Heavy computation — interval-algebra closure, calendar conversion — is the solver layer's job (Principle 12): the slice models the relations; gmeow temporal (TQL, the parameterized queries in queries/tql/) evaluates them. See docs/temporal-queries.md for the TQL reference.

The structural layer

gmeow:TimeInterval

A bounded stretch of time, optionally open-ended, delimited by gmeow:hasStartInstant / gmeow:hasEndInstant. Intervals are frame-independent structure: two intervals can be ordered (gmeow:intervalBefore) even when their instants are expressed in different calendars.

gmeow:Instant

A point on a timeline. Carries at least one of gmeow:instantValue (an xsd:dateTime) or gmeow:edtfValue (an EDTF literal — for the approximate, uncertain, and partial dates real data is full of), and links to its frame with gmeow:inTemporalFrame when the default frame does not apply. (Shape-enforced: an instant without any value is rejected — see shapes.ttl and queries/verify/no-instant-without-value.rq.)

The Allen relations

gmeow:intervalBefore / intervalAfter / intervalMeets / intervalMetBy / intervalOverlaps / intervalOverlappedBy / intervalStarts / intervalStartedBy / intervalDuring / intervalContains / intervalFinishes / intervalFinishedBy / intervalCoincidesWith — the thirteen jointly-exhaustive, pairwise-disjoint interval relations. JEPD is gate-checked on the reasoned graph (queries/verify/no-jepd-violation.rq); relation composition is computed by the solver, never asserted (Principle 12).

gmeow:TimeScopedRelation

The reified relator for facts that hold over a period — the promoted form of the flat-first pattern. Use the validFrom/validUntil annotations for the 80 % case; promote to a TimeScopedRelation (with gmeow:duringInterval) when the tenure itself needs identity, provenance, or standpoint.

The frame layer (Principle 11)

gmeow:TemporalFrame

A reference frame for temporal values: exactly one gmeow:frameTimeScale (UTC, TAI, a ship's log), an optional gmeow:frameCalendarSystem (Gregorian, Julian, a fictional calendar), and an optional gmeow:frameReferencePosition. A non-default date names its frame; conversion between frames is a computation, not an assertion. (Shape-enforced: exactly one timescale, realm, and kind.)

gmeow:TimeScale · gmeow:CalendarSystem · gmeow:ReferencePosition

Open value vocabularies (Principle 9 — never enums): a new calendar is data, not a schema change. The calendar slice builds its scheduling machinery atop these.

gmeow:NamedPeriod

A first-class named span — "the Bronze Age", "Q3 FY2026", "the Edo period" — with gmeow:periodStart/periodEnd/periodPartOf/periodContainsPeriod structure and an open gmeow:periodType. Periods are claims about spans and are typically standpoint-indexed (archaeological periodisations disagree; both coexist, Principle 9).

The claim layer

gmeow:TemporalMeasurement

A dated claim: gmeow:measuredDate (or gmeow:measuredAge), a gmeow:measurementMethod (gmeow:DatingMethod — radiocarbon, dendrochronology, stratigraphy, archival), a gmeow:measurementUncertainty, and a gmeow:measurementDeterminacy (ontic vagueness held apart from epistemic confidence — "circa 1850" is determinately vague, not unconfident). Attach with gmeow:hasTemporalMeasurement; this is the unified observation stance applied to time itself.

The scope layer (the statement clocks)

gmeow:validFrom · gmeow:validUntil · gmeow:assertedAt · gmeow:recordedNoLaterThan

Annotation properties (so the OWL downcast stays OWL 2 DL — Principles 2–3) carried by reified statements in any slice: fact-time (validFrom/validUntil), assertion-time (assertedAt), and the archival bound (recordedNoLaterThan). Together with standpoint tenure these are the clocks that let a fact be true then, asserted later, recorded later still, and disputed now — without collapsing any of those into another.

Convenience datatype properties for simple event timing (gmeow:atTime, gmeow:startedAtTime, gmeow:endedAtTime) follow the flat-first pattern.

Alignment & projection

Aligned by reference to OWL-Time (time:Instant/time:Interval/time:TRS, the Allen relations) and EDTF; projected to pure OWL-Time via the owl-time profile (mappings/owl-time.ttl — compiled to EDOAL + the executable CONSTRUCT). The frame concept maps to time:TRS; GMEOW's addition is making the frame first-class and self-describing (a Profile, Principle 11) rather than an opaque IRI.

Dependencies

Depends on core (gufo grounding, base properties) and profiles (the reference-frame Profile pattern). Depended on by nearly everything — events, places (tenures), calendar, employment, lifecycle, and the statement layer's clocks.