  Having a clear view of events that occurred over time is a difficult
objective to achieve in digital investigations (DI). Event reconstruction,
which allows investigators to understand the timeline of a crime, is one of the
most important step of a DI process. This complex task requires exploration of
a large amount of events due to the pervasiveness of new technologies nowadays.
Any evidence produced at the end of the investigative process must also meet
the requirements of the courts, such as reproducibility, verifiability,
validation, etc. For this purpose, we propose a new methodology, supported by
theoretical concepts, that can assist investigators through the whole process
including the construction and the interpretation of the events describing the
case. The proposed approach is based on a model which integrates knowledge of
experts from the fields of digital forensics and software development to allow
a semantically rich representation of events related to the incident. The main
purpose of this model is to allow the analysis of these events in an automatic
and efficient way. This paper describes the approach and then focuses on the
main conceptual and formal aspects: a formal incident modelization and
operators for timeline reconstruction and analysis.
