Spatial and temporal ontologies play a foundational role in modeling dynamic real-world phenomena across domains such as geographic information systems, artificial intelligence, and the Semantic Web. Although decades of research have advanced spatial reasoning, temporal logic, and ontology engineering, fully integrated spatio-temporal frameworks remain fragmented across disciplinary traditions. This paper presents a comprehensive review of spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal ontologies, examining their conceptual foundations, formal logical models and Semantic Web standards. The literature is analyzed to classify major modeling paradigms and to evaluate their theoretical assumptions, representational capabilities, and computational trade-offs. The review proposes a taxonomy distinguishing foundational ontologies, spatial-centric models, temporal-centric frameworks, integrated spatio-temporal systems. Comparative discussion highlights tensions between logical expressiveness and scalability, as well as challenges related to interoperability and dynamic reasoning. The analysis identifies persistent gaps, including limited native temporal support in description logics, complexity in modeling evolving spatial relations, absence of unified spatio-temporal standards, and lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks. The paper concludes by outlining research directions focused on hybrid ontology–knowledge graph architectures, multi-scale modeling, event-driven semantics, and neuro-symbolic integration. By synthesizing theoretical and applied perspectives, this review provides a structured foundation for advancing interoperable and scalable spatio-temporal knowledge systems capable of supporting next-generation intelligent applications.
Nipurakis et al. (Fri,) studied this question.