3.9.4.1
The version 3.9 of DOLCE-Lite (updated to D18 of DOLCE-Full) with some basic extensions, called DOLCE-Lite-Plus, or DLP. The ontology graph in this version is the following:
------Backbone:
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DOLCE-Lite#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/TemporalRelations#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/SpatialRelations#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/DnS#
------Basic extensions:
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/InformationObjects#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/Actions#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/SocialUnits#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/Plans#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/FunctionalParticipation#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/Collections#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/Collectives#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/CommonSenseMapping#
-----Experimental extensions:
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/Systems#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/SemioticCommunicationTheory#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/Causality#
http://www.loa-cnr.it/ontologies/ModalDescriptions#
The backbone of the library is constituted by
(1) DOLCE-Lite
(2) two sets of temporal relations defined over perdurants which are adapted from Allen's temporal calculus, and of spatial relations that simplify the expression of places and locations from particulars to regions
(3) the DnS (Descriptions and Situations) ontology, which provides a vocabulary to talk of reified entities such as relations, roles, contexts, situations, parameters, etc. Appropriate relations link DnS reifications to DOLCE-Lite non-reified entities. Based on that backbone, other wide-scoping ontologies are provided:
(4) ontology of information objects, based on semiotics, which provides a vocabulary to talk of languages, expressions vs. meaning, logical vs. physical documents, reference, etc.
(5) a still preliminary and rough vocabulary for actions, agents and social units (persons, organizations)
(6) a well-developed ontology of plans and tasks, containing also a set of individual tasks that provide grounded primitives to specify process types
(7) a preliminary ontology of functional participation relations, which provide a vocabulary for event-oriented relations encoded by linguistic verbs (in Western languages), like 'performs' or 'makes'
(8) an ontology of collections and collectives
(9) a set of common sense mappings, introduced to support a mapping to WordNet (contained in another file).
Besides these basic extensions, which are currently exploited in several application domains, and are actively under development, there are also some less developed ontologies, all bases on the backbone, but still at a preliminary and debatable stage. Some of them are included here as placeholders, and are used by some applications, but they are not yet stable.
*******Scope of DOLCE-Lite-Plus*******
The lite versions of DOLCE are simplified translations of DOLCE into various logical languages. They are maintained for several reasons:
1. allowing the implementation of DOLCE-based ontologies in languages that are less expressive than FOL. In particular, DOLCE-Lite does not make use of S5 modalities and of some temporally-indexed relations. Modal operators are not heavily exploited in DOLCE, then the consequences are not very harmful for most uses. Temporal indexing is partly supported by composing originally indexed relations with temporal location relations. Even this support is not provided for description logic versions of DOLCE-Lite like DAML+OIL, OWL-DL, etc.
2. allowing a description-logic-like naming policy for DOLCE signature. In many cases, different names are adopted for relations that have the same name but different arities in the FOL version, or for relations that have polymorphic domains
3. allowing extensions of DOLCE that do not have a detailed axiomatization yet, and modularizing them (placeholders)
4. taking benefit of the services of certain implemented languages -specially the classification services provided by description logics- in order to support domain applications The DLP ontology library is currently maintained in two languages: a dialect of KIF3.0 (PL), and DAML+OIL. The first one contains a complete code for the library, including theWordNet alignment modules. The second one contains the library (according to available costructs of DAML+OIL) without the WordNet code, since it is very simple and takes much space. DLP+KIF is currently used in some applications that need deep inferences, which can only be provided by expressive, logic-programming-enabled languages. DLP+DAML is currently used in Semantic Web applications, for example in the Core Ontology for Services (COS). The extensions to DOLCE presented in the library are work in progress, and although some of them have been tested in realistic applications, they should be taken cautiously from the viewpoint of rigorous formal ontology.
DOLCE-Lite-Plus
A social object that is not assumed to have intentionality (in the wider sense of conceiving some description). Since a social object is dependent on physical ones, it is not trivial to interpret the local sense in which a social object 'conceives' a description. See 'agentive-social-object' for some discussion.
0
An atomic region.
A saturated plan is a plan that cannot be executed twice, since it defines spatio-temporal parameters restricted to one value, e.g. one of its tasks classifies an event that is valued by a definite temporal value in a definite space region.
Of course, in the case of maximal spatio-temporal regions, a saturated plan tends to approximate an abstract plan from the execution viewpoint, but these worst cases are unavoidable when dealing with maximality.
a.k.a. 'social individual'.
Figures are social objects defined or used by descriptions, but differently from concepts, they do not classify entities.
Examples of figures are organisations, political geographic objects, sacred symbols, etc.
Organized collections introduce a different unity criterion for collections. They can be conceived as characterized by further roles played by some (or all) members of the collection, and related among them through the social objects (figures, descriptions, collections) that either use or depute or are covered by them.
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A physical body is a non-agentive physical object whose primary identity criterion is not given by its artefactual origin, if any. For example, a rock or a tree can be considered physical bodies unless or until they are not viewed as artifacts.
As a matter of fact, no easy definition of artifactual properties is possible, hence it is better to rely on alternative descriptions and roles: a physical object that shows or is known to have an artifactual origin that counts in the tasks an ontology is supposed to support, will be a material artifact.
On the other hand, physical objects that do not show that origin, or that origin is unimportant for the task of the ontology, will be physical bodies.
Formally, a restriction is provided here that requires for a material artifact to play no role defined by a plan or project.
BTW, a physical body can still be a *device*, can be 'used' and have 'functions' (roles), e.g. a stone used as a weapon, but it plays no role like being produced, as artifacts do.
Physical bodies can have several granularity levels: geological, chemical, physical, biological, etc.
Formerly known as description.
A unitary endurant with no mass (non-physical), generically constantly depending on some intentional agent, on some communication act, and indirectly on some agent participating in that act.
Either descriptions (in the current sense), and concepts are non-physical objects.
Here communication is taken in a rather wide sense, being possible as an (intentional) activity as well as a phenomenon.
A commitment is a cognitive modal description, characterized by certain obligations and rights targeted by at least one of its roles.
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A task that has at least two other tasks as components.
A quality inherent in a perdurant.
A description usually requiring a C-SAT satisfaction for a situation. Norms, codes of practice, etc. are examples.
The situation in which a working system interacts with its environment according to its functionality description.
A control task is an elementary task that sequences a planning activity, e.g. an activity aimed at (cognitively or via simulation) anticipating other activities. Therefore, control tasks have usually at least one direct successor task (the controlled one), with the exception of ending tasks.
The reification of control constructs allows to represent procedural knowledge into the same ontology including controlled action. Besides cognitive transparency and independency from a particular grounding system, a further advantage is enable the representation of coordination tasks. For example, a manager that coordinates the execution of several related activities can be represented as a role with a responsibility (duty+right) towards some complex task.
Any physical body at the chemical granularity level.
Eventive occurrences (events) are called achievements if they are atomic, otherwise they are accomplishments.
Further developments: being 'achievement', 'accomplishment', 'state', 'event', etc. can be also considered 'aspects' of processes or of parts of them.
For example, the same process 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley' can be seen as an accomplishment (what has brought the current state that e.g. we are trying to explain), as an achievement (the erosion process as the result of a previous accomplishment), as a state (collapsing the time interval of the erosion into a time point), as an event (what has changed our focus from a state to another).
In the erosion case, we could have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) condensation d) transition (causality).
A goal situation is a situation that satisfies a goal.
Opposite to the case of subplan executions, a goal situation is not part of a plan execution.
In other words, it is not true in general that any situation satisfying a part of a description, is also part of the situation that satisfies the whole description.
This helps to account for the following cases:
¥ Execution of plans containing abort or suspension conditions (the plan would be satisfied even if the goal has not been reached, see below)
¥ Incidental satisfaction, like when a situation satisfies a goal without being intentionally planned (but anyway desired).
Eventive occurrences (events) are called achievements if they are atomic, otherwise they are accomplishments.
Further developments: being 'achievement', 'accomplishment', 'state', 'event', etc. can be also considered 'aspects' of processes or of parts of them.
For example, the same process 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley' can be seen as an accomplishment (what has brought the current state that e.g. we are trying to explain), as an achievement (the erosion process as the result of a previous accomplishment), as a state (collapsing the time interval of the erosion into a time point), as an event (what has changed our focus from a state to another).
In the erosion case, we could have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) condensation d) transition (causality).
A non-social relation(ship): formal, linguistic, etc. It is considered here a theory, because relations are established in order to give an ordering to some reality.
A perceptual structure, from the descriptive viewpoint. In other words, this encodes the conditions by which a configuration, structure, or arrangement is perceived by a cognitive agent.
Agentive figures are those which are assigned (agentive) roles from a society or community; hence, they can act like a physical agent:
AgentiveFigure(x) ? Figure(x) ? ?y,z,w. Description(y) ? Role(z) ? Description(w) ? yw ? Defines(y,z) ? Defines(w,x) ? Selects(z,x)
Typical agentive figures are societies, organizations, and in general all socially constructed persons.
Figures are not dependent on roles defined or used in the same descriptions they are defined or used, but they can act because they depute some powers to some of those roles. In other words, a figure classified by some agentive role can play that role because there are other roles in the descriptions that define or use the figure. Those roles classify endurants that result to act for the figure:
DeputedBy(r,f) ? Role(r) ? Figure(f) ? ?d. Description(d) ? Uses(d,r) ? Uses(d,f)
DeputedBy(r,f) ? ?r1. Role(r1) ? Selects(r1,f)
ActsFor(e,f) ? ?r. Role(r) ? DeputedBy(r,f) ? Selects(r,e)
For example, an employee acts for an organization that deputes the role (e.g. turner) that classifies the employee. Simply put, a guy working as a turner at FIAT acts for (or on behalf of) FIAT.
In complex figures, like organizations or societies, a total agency is possible when an endurant plays a delegate, or representative role of the figure.
Since figures are social objects, it is conceivable to find figures that act for other figures.
A role played by some feature of a physical object.
a.k.a. unitary collection in D18.
The physical counterpart of a collection.
A collection (see) is characterized by a conventional or emergent property.
Physical pluralities have as *proper parts* only physical objects that are *members* of a same collection.
A plan is a method for executing or performing a procedure or a stage of a procedure.
A plan must use both at least one role played by an agent, and at least one task.
Finally, a plan has a goal as proper part, and can also have regulations and other descriptions as proper parts.
An atom at time t.
Within stative occurrences, we distinguish between states and processes according to homeomericity: sitting is classified as a state but running is classified as a process, since there are (very short) temporal parts of a running that are not themselves runnings.
In general, processes differ from situations because they are not assumed to have a description from which they depend. They can be sequenced by some course, but they do not require a description as a unifying criterion.
On the other hand, at any time, one can conceive a description that asserts the constraints by which a process of a certian type is such, and in this case, it becomes a situation.
Since the decision of designing an explicit description that unifies a perdurant depends on context, task, interest, application, etc., when aligning an ontology do DLP, there can be indecision on where to align a process-oriented class.
For example, in the WordNet alignment, we have decided to put only some physical processes under 'process', e.g. 'organic process', in order to stress the social orientedness of DLP. But whereas we need to talk explicitly of the criteria by which we conceive organic processes, these will be put under 'situation'.
Similar considerations are made for the other types of perdurants in DOLCE.
A different notion of event (dealing with change) is currently investigated for further developments: being 'achievement', 'accomplishment', 'state', 'event', etc. can be also considered 'aspects' of processes or of parts of them.
For example, the same process 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley' can be conceptualized as an accomplishment (what has brought the current state that e.g. we are trying to explain), as an achievement (the erosion process as the result of a previous accomplishment), as a state (if we collapse the time interval of the erosion into a time point), or as an event (what has changed our focus from a state to another).
In the erosion case, we could have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) condensation d) transition (causality).
If we want to consider all the aspects of a process together, we need to postulate a unifying descriptive set of criteria (i.e. a 'description'), according to which that process is circumstantiated in a 'situation'. The different aspects will arise as a parts of a same situation.
A non-physical place, generically dependent on some (physical) geographical object.
A bag task is a complex task that does not include either a control task, or a successor relation among any two component tasks.
The last condition cannot be stated in OWL-DL, because it needs a coreference.
A role used to express logical levels within some layering description or granular partition. A typical example is the Linnean taxonomic ordering, where Phylum or Species are hierarchical roles.
We use the presence and structure of a unifying plan in order to characterize kinds of collectives. A preliminary consideration is that plan unification can have two senses.
The first one only takes into account the action schemas executed by the members, who do not necessarily interact in a ÔglobalÕ way. In other words, the roles played by members cover the collective, because they are (dispositionally) played by each member.
The second sense is richer, and assumes that the unifying (maximal) plan (d-)uses roles that characterize (are played by some members, and related between them in a typical way) the collective.
The first sense of plan unification is applicable to a subclass of simple collectives that we call here 'simple-planned-collectives'.
The second sense of plan unification applies to intentional collectives proper.
An intentional collective acts intentionally because its members act, and because it is unified by a plan that is conceived by some cognitive agent. Therefore, there is nothing special in a collective being intentional: it is just a matter of having a plan and agentive members playing its characterizing roles. What is special is the distinction between the diversified ways of acting collectively (see subclasses).
A placeholder for some roles in common sense that do not easily map to other types of roles. More work is needed here.
Within Physical objects, a special place have those to which we ascribe generic intentionality (compatibly to Brentano's distinction, the ability to conceive a description). These are called Agentive, as opposite to Non-agentive.
In general, we assume that agentive objects are constituted by non-agentive objects: a person is constituted by an organism, a robot is constituted by some machinery, and so on. Among non-agentive physical objects we have for example houses, body organs, pieces of wood, etc.
Generic agentivity is defined here in a wide sense as implying conception (to be characterized in a dedicated Ð but not developed as yet Ð ontology of mind). A conception only requires intentionality in BrentanoÕs terms (i.e., the ability to represent something to oneself).
See also 'cognitive agentive physical object'.
An agentive physical object that is able to have desires and intentions, besides beliefs. In this ontology, this is encoded as having the ability to conceive plans.
Features that are relevant parts of their host, like a bump or an edge.
A physical plurality dependent on a collection that is unified by a project or plan to 'produce' it, or acts for a figure (e.g. an organization).
A role defined (not just used!) by a causal description, and exploited to conceptualize some causation invariants.
Causal notions are still primitive in this version of DLP.
Plan executions are situations that proactively satisfy a plan (cf. definition of P-SAT above).
Subplan executions are proper parts of the whole plan execution.
An organized collection whose only members are agents.
An action task is an elementary task that sequences non-planning activities, like: moving, exercising forces, gathering information, etc. Planning activites are mental events involving some rational event.
A technique is a practical method to obtain some modification in the environment (or evaluation of an environment) that fulfils some task.
A part of a word that can express a meaning.
A concept that classifies (in particular, it is 'valued by') regions, as a component of some description. Parameters are the descriptive counterpart of regions, and, as regions represent the qualities of perdurants or endurants, they can be requisites for some functional role or course.
A parameter has at least one region that is value for it.
A region at which only physical qualities can be directly located. It assumes some metrics for physical properties.
A state related to planning. It is sequenced by 'deliberation task', and is preceded by a decision activity.
The task sequencing a decision activity, aiming at if action has to be taken in order to start a plan execution.
The task sequencing an activity from which the possibility is raised to execute a plan.
A task that articulates the plan into an ordered set of tasks.
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A case task branched to exactly 2 tasks, not executable in parallel.
A case task is a task branched to a set of tasks that are not executable concurrently.
In order to choose the task to be executed, preliminary deliberation tasks should be executed.
A case task sequences a decision activity (a kind of mental event involving rationality) that has a deliberation state as outcome (sequenced by a deliberation task).
A control task that directly precedes both a case task and some other task.
It specializes the branching task.
A concurrent task is a task branched to a set of tasks executable concurrently (the sequenced perdurants can overlap), which means that no deliberation task is performed in order to choose among them. A concurrent task has at least one successor synchronization task, which is aimed at waiting for the execution of all (except the optional ones) tasks direct successor to the concurrent (or any order, see below) one.
The axioms cannot be expressed fully in OWL-DL (no value mapping available).
An any order task is a branching task that defines no order in the successor tasks. ItÕs another way of defining a bag task, because any temporal relation can be expected between any two perdurants sequenced by the tasks that are direct successor to the any order task.
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A task for parallel concurrent activities.
A task that joins a set a tasks after a branching.
In particular, a synchronization task is aimed at waiting for the execution of all (except the optional ones) tasks that are direct successor to a concurrent or any order task.
2
The task sequencing a decision to take action in order to start a plan execution.
The task sequencing an assessment that the activities aiming at creating the prerequisites to start a plan execution are completed.
The task joining the decision and preparation phases of the plan assessment, with the activation phases of the plan.
A control task aimed at starting an activity. It is specialized either by a beginning task or a reactivation task.
A specialization of ending-task, aimed at sequencing events that end a plan execution without having reached its main-goal for a certain time
A specialization of ending-task, aimed at sequencing events that end a plan execution having reached its main-goal.
A specialization of ending-task, aimed at sequencing events that end a plan execution without having reached its main-goal, but with the possibility or resurrecting the plan.
A specialization of ending-task, aimed at sequencing events that end a plan execution without having reached its main-goal, and with no intention to resurrect the plan.
An ending task is a control task that has no successor tasks defined in the plan.
An activation task to start a plan execution after it has been suspended.
A beginning task is a control task that is the predecessor of all tasks defined in the plan.
The task sequencing a positive decision to adopt a plan execution.
The task sequencing a negative decision to adopt a plan execution.
A loop task, which specifies when a certain condition becomes true for a cyclical task to exit.
A loop task with a defined number (and possibly frequency) of iterations.
A loop task is a control task that has as successor an action (or complex) task that sequences at least two distinct activities sharing a minimal common set of properties (they have a minimal common type).
Notice that MinimalCommonType cannot be formalised as a first-order predicate, and then neither in OWL-DL. It can be considered a trivial guideline: Çwhen sequencing looped actions, choose a definite action class from the ground ontologyÈ.
Some relations typically hold for loop tasks. Exit condition can be used to state what deliberation task (see below) causes to exit the cycle; iteration interval can be used to state how much time should be taken by each iteration of the looped activity; iteration cardinality can be used to state how many times the action should be repeated.
A deliberation task is a control task that sequences deliberation states (decisions taken after a case task execution).
A role played by some substance.
A simple collection whose members are only agents.
Examples of Social Descriptions are laws, norms, shares, peace treaties, etc., which are generically dependent on societies.
Social descriptions are dependent on a community of agents.
A quality space is a topologically maximal region. The constraint of maximality cannot be given completely in OWL, but a constraint is given that creates a partition out of all quality spaces (e.g. no two quality spaces can overlap mereologically).
Any physical entity that realizes an information object.
A political geographic object that is (generically) dependent on some physical place (in principle, countries can change their borders).
A role played by some substance or object within a commercial transaction description.
This is a role (e.g. closed area) for places. Locative roles are played by physical objects (in locational cases, physical places), as well as non-physical places (individual places depending on a physical object).
Any physical particular that realizes a non-physical endurant. Such physical particulars can be either physical endurants, physical qualities, physical regions, perdurants with at least one physical participant, or a situation with one physical entity in its setting.
Ultimately, a physical realization depends on at least one physical endurant (each of the others physical entity types depend on a physical endurant to be considered as such).
Fluxes are processes that (also) contain accomplishments as constituents. In other words, fluxes emerge out of accomplishments.
A maximal task is a complex task that has all the tasks defined in a plan as components.
In OWL-DL the axiom is defined as a concept axiom over plan component task.
A simple collective covered by roles corresponding to natural science properties ascribed to members.
A code that orders the generation of information objects according to formally defined vocabulary, axioms, rules, etc.
An agentive physical object, capable of 'acting for' a social individual.
Socially-constructed persons, like legal ones, can be acted by natural persons, but are never identical to them, since social and physical objects are disjoint in DOLCE. As a consequence e.g. someone after death can no longer be a natural person, but in some legal systems, the legal counterpart (a socially-constructed person) can still exist for some legal contexts, e.g. for hereditary issues.
Collections are social objects (either agentive or not), which are not defined by a description, but they depend both on member entities and on some concepts, figures, and indirectly on descriptions. While we could talk in general of collections of any kind of entities (events, objects, abstracts, etc.), we restrict here our attention to collections of endurants, and therefore to their roles (not to concepts whatsoever).
2
An information object ordered by a shematic iconic code
An information encoding system that provides roles and operations to create valid information objects (e.g. grammars, templates, codes).
An organization bearing a legal status and having powers conferred by Law.
Desires in general are characterised by defining or using at least one intentional agentive role or figure, and at least one course towards which the role or figure has a desire.
The coreference between the two axioms cannot be represented in OWL-DL.
A social object that is assumed to have intentionality (in the wider sense of conceiving some description).
Since a social object is dependent on physical ones, it is not trivial to interpret the local sense in which a social object 'conceives' a description.
For example, an institution can have the belief in the existence of some physical person, but this is possible by means of the powers conferred by some legal system, through its representatives, and that belief has to verified or 'used' by means of the physical agents that 'act for' the institution.
A different sense of social object conceiving descriptions holds for collectives, which ground the overall conception on either a shared, or distributed, or external description conceived by either members of the collective, or by some non-member agent.
An ordinary space: geographical, cosmological, anatomical, topographic, etc.
A simple collection covered by roles corresponding to natural science properties ascribed to members.
A figure (e.g. Italy) for non-physical (i.e. socially- or cognitively-constructed) places.
Non-physical places generically depend on physical places.
Social type-based collectives are type-based collectives that are *covered* by roles typical of the social world.
Social collectives are usually based on action schemas (practices, rather than plans, which are typical of intentional collectives).
They can be distinguished into neighborhood, geographic (at various granularities), ethnic, linguistic, commercial, industrial, scientific, political, religious, institutional, administrative, professional, sportive, interest-based, stylistic, devotional, etc.
WordNet contains an impressive set of social-type-based-collectives, which are encoded in the lexicon.
A feature that is not part of its host, like a hole in a piece of cheese, the underneath of a table, the front of a house, or the shadow of a tree.
A collection whose members are only agents.
Collectives can be classified according to different property kinds. The first one is the type of members (e.g. physical persons, boys, cows, left-handers, etc.). Types are used in traditional classifications.
For example, biological collectives can be distinguished from social collectives, based on the (biological or social) properties ascribed to members.
A main goal can be defined as a goal that is part of a plan but not of one of its subplans.
The characteristic axiom cannot be formalized in OWL-DL (it requires coreference).
This is used in a wide cultural sense: a theory about something, expressed in a rather systematic way, but not necessarily public (although communicable in principle). An axiomatic theory is not a theory in this sense, although we can expect an axiomatic theory to be the formal representation of a generic theory.
A set of rules for the generation of a (closed or open set of) information objects.
An occurrence-type is stative or eventive according to whether it holds of the mereological sum of two of its instances, i.e. if it is cumulative or not. A sitting occurrence is stative since the sum of two sittings is still a sitting occurrence.
A biological collective covered by genetic roles (whose members are identified by means of the genetic properties ascribed to them).
a.k.a. social agent.
a.k.a. social figure.
An agentive figure created and maintained by a society (a collective).
The main characteristic of physical objects is that they are endurants with unity. However, they have no common unity criterion, since different subtypes of objects may have different unity criteria. Differently from aggregates, (most) physical objects change some of their parts while keeping their identity, they can have therefore temporary parts. Often physical objects (indeed, all endurants) are ontologically independent from occurrences (discussed below). However, if we admit that every object has a life, it is hard to exclude a mutual specific constant dependence between the two. Nevertheless, we may still use the notion of dependence to (weakly) characterize objects as being not specifically constantly dependent on other objects.
The modal descriptions depending on some mental attitude, represented here by means of a relation between roles and tasks.
A catch-all class for entities from the social world. It includes agentive and non-agentive socially-constructed objects: descriptions, concepts, figures, collections, information objects.
It could be equivalent to 'non-physical object', but we leave open the possibility of 'private' non-physical objects.
In dependency terms, an activity is an action that is generically constantly dependent on a conventional, shared description (course) adopted by participants. Intuitively, activities are complex actions that are at least partly conventionally planned.
A region at which only abstract qualities can be directly located. It assumes some metrics for abstract (neither physical nor temporal) properties.
A course used to sequence phenomena (non-intentional processes).
A parameter valued by regions that are used asindicators for some behaviour or event to be checked.
We distinguish between a quality (e.g., the color of a specific rose), and its value (e.g., a particular shade of red). The latter is called quale, and describes the position of an individual quality within a certain conceptual space (called here quality space) Gardenfors (2000). So when we say that two roses have (exactly) the same color, we mean that their color qualities, which are distinct, have the same position in the color space, that is they have the same color quale.
A commitment in which an obligation to some future result is expressed.
A role that can only be played by agents. Here mainly for alignment purpose of WordNet.
A social individual that promotes a collective to a definite social recognition.
It is usually acted by a collective, but there can be exceptions (e.g. mononuclear families).
A situation satisfying the production workflow of a system.
The main characteristic of abstract entities is that they do not have spatial nor temporal qualities, and they are not qualities themselves. The only class of abstract entities we consider in the present version of the upper ontology is that of quality regions (or simply regions). Quality spaces are special kinds of quality regions, being mereological sums of all the regions related to a certain quality type. The other examples of abstract entities (sets and facts) are only indicative.
A social method carried out explicitly or by tradition, spontaneously emerged, or moderately or strongly regulated.
A type of simple collections are parametrized collections, whose members must have a quality constrained by some parameter that is a requisite of their covering role(s):
ParametrizedCollection(c) =df SimpleCollection(c) ? ?r,p,v,t. Covers(r,c) ? RequisiteFor(p,r,t) ? ValueFor(v,p) ? ?e. Membership(e,c,t) ? ?q. InheresIn(q,e,t) ? Q-Location(q,v)
For example, a crowd of people has members that have spatial positions in a range that makes them proximal (a condition traditionally used to distinguish so-called aggregates (King 2004)).
On the other hand, if positions are reciprocally relevant (as, for instance, in a living chess setting) according to multiple roles defined by some plan or design, the collection becomes organized.
The main characteristic of endurants is that all of them are independent essential wholes. This does not mean that the corresponding property (being an endurant) carries proper unity, since there is no common unity criterion for endurants. Endurants can 'genuinely' change in time, in the sense that the very same endurant as a whole can have incompatible properties at different times. To see this, suppose that an endurant say 'this paper' has a property at a time t 'it's white', and a different, incompatible property at time t' 'it's yellow': in both cases we refer to the whole object, without picking up any particular part of it. Within endurants, we distinguish between physical and non-physical endurants, according to whether they have direct spatial qualities. Within physical endurants, we distinguish between amounts of matter, objects, and features.
A circumstantial plan has all concepts classifying named individuals from the ground ontology (e.g. only specific persons, specified resources, a finite number of time intervals and space regions, etc.).
This condition cannot be formalized in FOL, since we would like to express a condition by which an instance of an circumstantial plan specifies both instances of plan components, and instances of situation elements, e.g. that 'manager' classifies a specified (named) person.
A task defined in a plan assessment.
A situation is an entity that appears in the domain of an ontology only because there is a description whose components can Òcarve upÓ a view (setting) on that domain. A situation has to satisfy a description (see below for ways of defining the satisfies relation), and it has to be setting for at least one entity.
In other words, it is the ontological counterpart of settings (situations fron SC, contexts, episodes, states of affairs, structures, configurations, cases, etc.).
This results to be a new category in DOLCE, but it could be equivalently modelled as a special complex perdurant defined through its relations to qualities, regions, and endurants. In fact, a perdurant is usually the only mandatory constituent of a setting.
Two descriptions of a same situation are possible, otherwise we would result in a solipsistic ontology.
The time and space (and possibly other qualities) of a situation are the time and space of the entities in the setting.
A technique to evaluate a plan execution.
A quality inherent in a physical endurant.
A simple collection (for instance, a collection of saxophones, or a mass of lymphocytes ) is a collection having only covering roles:
(D13) SimpleCollection(c) =df Collection(c) ? ?r. Covers(r,c) ? Â?s. Characterizes(s,c)
Also known as 'functional role'.
A concept that classifies (in particular, it is 'played by') endurants, as used in some description. Roles are the descriptive counterpart of endurants, and, as endurants participate in perdurants, they usually have courses as modal targets (see).
The typology of roles is still preliminary.
The information realized by an entity for creative purposes. Here mainly for mapping purpose from WordNet.
A socially-constructed person with a complex articulation of tasks, roles and figures.
A role played by descriptions only. Usable for metalinguistic notions, like those that deal with granular partitions of knowledge, strata of reality, argumentation, etc.
The description of a system from the design viewpoint (how it is structured, but also including possible aesthetic or functional descriptions).
A role played by assets involved in a legal possession description.
Formerly: (non-) agentive temporary role.
A role for talking of someone or something at certain phases of own life. It can be used also to map temporal parts of agentive objects from a 4D ontology.
A time interval with no proper parts (within the clocktick chosen for the time-interval quality space).
A region at which only temporal qualities can be directly located. It assumes a metrics for time.
Amount of matter playing a typically 'functional' role at some time in some situation.
An information encoding system that provides rules for (ev. ordered) lists of information objects, e.g terminologies, subjects, knowledge domains.
A complex task that has at least one control task (and then, at least one action task as well) as component.
Any physical body at the biological granularity level. They are (generically) constituted by chemical objects.
The common trait of amounts of matter is that they are endurants with no unity (according to Gangemi et a. 2001 none of them is an essential whole). Amounts of matter - 'stuffs' referred to by mass nouns like 'gold', 'iron', 'wood', 'sand', 'meat', etc. - are mereologically invariant, in the sense that they change their identity when they change some parts.
An occurrence-type is stative or eventive according to whether it holds of the mereological sum of two of its instances, i.e. if it is cumulative or not. A sitting occurrence is stative since the sum of two sittings is still a sitting occurrence.
In general, events differ from situations because they are not assumed to have a description from which they depend. They can be sequenced by some course, but they do not require a description as a unifying criterion.
On the other hand, at any time, one can conceive a description that asserts the constraints by which an event of a certian type is such, and in this case, it becomes a situation.
Since the decision of designing an explicit description that unifies a perdurant depends on context, task, interest, application, etc., when aligning an ontology do DLP, there can be indecision on where to align an event-oriented class.
For example, in the WordNet alignment, we have decided to put only some physical events under 'event', e.g. 'discharge', in order to stress the social orientedness of DLP. But whereas we need to talk explicitly of the criteria by which we conceive discharge events, these will be put under 'situation'.
Similar considerations are made for the other types of perdurants in DOLCE.
A different notion of event (dealing with change) is currently investigated for further developments: being 'achievement', 'accomplishment', 'state', 'event', etc. can be also considered 'aspects' of processes or of parts of them.
For example, the same process 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley' can be conceptualized as an accomplishment (what has brought the current state that e.g. we are trying to explain), as an achievement (the erosion process as the result of a previous accomplishment), as a state (if we collapse the time interval of the erosion into a time point), or as an event (what has changed our focus from a state to another).
In the erosion case, we could have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) condensation d) transition (causality).
If we want to consider all the aspects of a process together, we need to postulate a unifying descriptive set of criteria (i.e. a 'description'), according to which that process is circumstantiated in a 'situation'. The different aspects will arise as a parts of a same situation.
We use the presence and structure of a unifying plan in order to characterize kinds of collectives. A preliminary consideration is that plan unification can have two senses.
The first one only takes into account the action schemas executed by the members, who do not necessarily interact in a ÔglobalÕ way. In other words, the roles played by members cover the collective, because they are (dispositionally) played by each member.
The second sense is richer, and assumes that the unifying (maximal) plan (d-)uses roles that characterize the collective.
The first sense of plan unification is applicable to a subclass of simple collectives that we call here 'simple-planned-collectives'.
A linguistic object consisting of a string (independently of its physical realization). Its topological unity can change according to its physical realization: as a written realization, its boundaries are blank spaces, as a spoken realization, sometimes is silence, sometimes not, and higher order features intervene.
A Perdurant that exemplifies the intentionality of an agent. Could it be aborted, incomplete, mislead, while remaining a (potential) accomplishment ... The point here is that having a result depends on a method, then an action remains an action under incomplete results. As a matter of fact, if we neutralize intentionality, a purely topological, post-hoc view is at odds with the notion of incomplete accomplishments.
A quality space used as a reference metrics ("measurement space") for other spaces. It is usually "counted by" some number.
The description of a system from the functional viewpoint (how it works).
A temporal region, measured according to a calendar.
Any situation that satisfies Jakobson's communication theory.
A specialization of the interpreter role, played by creators of information objects expressing some description.
A specialization of the interpreter role, played by the agents trying to conceive the description expressed by some information object created by agents playing the encoder role.
A generalization of the encoder and decoder roles in Jakobson's theory of communication, which should be played by an agent.
The context role in Jakobson's theory of communication.
Interpretation functions are descriptions that can include roles either for semiotics or for formal semantics.
Here we only characterize a basic, simple theory of semiotic interpretation. Three semiotic roles are defined: s-context (semiotic context), expression, and meaning.
It has complex dependencies to mental objects, social objects, as well as references to entities as such, but we currently prefer to put it here as a placeholder (a forthcoming ontology of mind should give some more detail on those issues). See semiotic roles for further comments.
The message role in Jakobson's theory of communication, played by information objects. It specializes the expression role from semiotic interpretation theory.
Expression is a semiotic role played by information objects.
It is used to fill the first domain of the so-called 'interpretation function'. It can be considered equivalent to the 'message' communication role, but since communication theory and semiotic theories are different, it is more correct to say that a message role specializes an expression role.
Meaning is a semiotic role played by descriptions whatsoever.
It is used to fill the range of the so-called 'interpretation function'.
It is not equivalent to any communication function.
S-context (semiotic context) is played by descriptions and is a semiotic role. It is used to fill the second domain of the so-called 'interpretation function'.
It may be equivalent to the 'c-context' communication role, but since communication theory and semiotic theories are different, it is more correct to say that c-context (communication context) specializes s-context.
Jakobson defined six functions of communication that are compatible with Shannon's theory of information. They are the 'message', here covered by 'Message-Role', the context, covered here by 'C-Context', the code, covered by 'Code', plus 'Channel', 'Encoder', and 'Decoder', which are introduced below. Message-Role, C-Context, and Code can also be viewed as playing a semiotic role (Expression, S-Context, Semiotic-Code).
For a communication theory in general, we also need other components that are not specified in Jakobson's theory', e.g. 'turn-taking', governing the sequence of a communication process, 'communication parameters', governing the values that participants and events of a communication should have in order for the communication to be successful (i.e. for the communication method to be satisfied), 'conversational maxims' (superordered theories) that provide guidelines for communication to be successful, etc.
The code role in Jakobson's theory of communication, which should be played by an information-encoding-system.
The channel role in Jakobson's theory of communication.
An information object ordered by (encoded according to) a language.
A proper part of a plan.
The class of situations that satisfy the semiotic interpretation function (given an expression and a context, a meaning is provided).
Any region resulting from the composition of a space region with a temporal region, i.e. being present in region r at time t.
An information object ordered by a visual code.
A collection of non-physical objects that is characterized by a conventional or emergent property, e.g. a corpus, a legal body, etc.
A non-physical collection only has non-physical endurants as members.
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Qualities can be seen as the basic entities we can perceive or measure: shapes, colors, sizes, sounds, smells, as well as weights, lengths, electrical charges... 'Quality' is often used as a synonymous of 'property', but this is not the case in this upper ontology: qualities are particulars, properties are universals. Qualities inhere to entities: every entity (including qualities themselves) comes with certain qualities, which exist as long as the entity exists.
The descriptive, unifying aspect of a system (usually it includes at least a design, or project, plan, etc.).
The abstract content of a proposition. Abstract content is purely combinatorial: from this viewpoint, any content that can be generated by means of combinatorial rules is assumed to exist in the domain of quantification (reified abstracts).
A definite social figure that is constructed and acted by other previously existing persons (socially constructed or naturally born). A person in general is not characterized in this ontology.
In a legal extension, it could be reasonable to create a class of legal persons, defined by legal constitutive descriptions, which includes the legal figures related to both natural and socially-constructed persons.
A concept that classifies (in particular, it 'sequences') perdurants (processes, events, or states), as a component of some description. Courses are the descriptive counterpart of perdurants, and, as perdurants have endurants as participatants, they are usually the target of attitudes of some functional role. This relation is named 'modality target of', because it actually reifies at first order a typology of modal relations.
A description whose main purpose is defining a figure.
The roles employed to characterize communication. E.g. the roles from Jakobson's theory of communication.
A physical place whose spatial quality is q-located in geographical coordinates.
A dummy class used to join agentive objects (either physical or social).
Agents are dispositionally so, in the sense that they are able to conceive descriptions and possible actions, but they do not necessarily act.
In everyday language, agent is used in this sense, but also to tell that something has acted in a certain way, or to say that something has an initiator or leading role in some action. In DLP, the performs relation encodes these notions.
The realization aspect of a system, satisfying the descriptive aspect.
If the descriptive part only includes a design, it can be a situation in which that design has been realized (e.g. consisting essentially of a system-as-artifact as a design object).
If the descriptive part includes a project, it can be a workflow situation resulting in the production of e.g. a system-as-artifact.
If the descriptive part includes a set of instructions, it can be a situation in which e.g. a system-as-artifact interacts with the environment effectively (according to some evaluation criteria).
A state of the (embodied) mind
An endurant with no mass, generically constantly depending on some intentional agent.
Non-physical endurants can have physical constituents (e.g. in the case of members of a collection).
A description that contains a specification to do, realize, behave, etc. Subclasses are plan, technique, practice, project, etc.
A description is a non-physical object, which represents a conceptualization (as a mental object or state), hence generically dependent on some agent, and which is also social, i.e. communicable.
Descriptions define or use concepts or figures, and can be satisfied by situations.
The typology of descriptions is still preliminary.
Information objects are social objects. They are realized by some entity. They are ordered (expressed according to) by some system for information encoding. Consequently, they are dependent from an encoding as well as from a concrete realization.
They can express a description (the ontological equivalent of a meaning/conceptualization), can be about any entity, and can be interpreted by an agent.
From a communication perspective, an information object can play the role of "message". From a semiotic perspective, it playes the role of "expression".
A complex linguistic object, expressed according to a language and still independent from a particular physical support.
AKA arbitrary-collection.
The mereological sum of any two or more endurants (physical or not). Arbitrary sums have no unity criterion (they are 'extensional').
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A collection having only texts as members.
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AKA "internal description". Mental objects are dependent on an intentional agent. This class is just a pointer to a complex ontology of mental entities that is currently under development.
A role only played by collections.
An abstract plan is a plan whose roles and tasks only specify classes of entities that can be included in a plan execution. In other words, a component from an abstract plan does not involve any named entity.
This condition cannot be formalized in FOL, since we would like to express a condition by which an instance of an abstract plan specifies instances of plan components, but no instances of situation elements, e.g. that 'manager' classifies some (if any) instance of person, but not a specified (named) person.
A role created and maintained by a society.
No easy definition of artifactual properties is possible, hence it is better to rely on alternative descriptions and roles: a physical object that shows or is known to have an artifactual origin that counts in the tasks an ontology is supposed to support, will be a material artifact.
On the other hand, physical objects that do not show that origin, or that origin is unimportant for the task of the ontology, will be physical bodies.
Formally, a restriction is provided here that requires for a material artifact to play some role defined by a plan or project.
A phenomenon is basically a process that does not include any intentional active participation.
It can be seen as an accomplishment when some intentionality puts boundaries on it (although it is not claimed to be inherently intentional). On the other hand, a purely physical phenomenon does not seem to have inherent boundaries either ... and also for biological processes as well as economic processes this seems to be disputable. If the boundary hypothesis is discarded, phenomenon should migrate under process.
A role that involves responsibility, e.g. both duties and rights, in order to perform some task. It usually involves additional rights and/or powers in contexts (descriptions) different from the one that defines the status.
A feature related to spatial properties.
A geographical place, conventionally accepted by a community.
Reconstructed fluxes are fluxes that only contain accomplishments as members.
A mathematical set.
Responsibility is preliminarily described here as a commitment that includes a status, which has some rights and duties towards some task (see related axioms).
Perdurants (AKA occurrences) comprise what are variously called events, processes, phenomena, activities and states. They can have temporal parts or spatial parts. For instance, the first movement of (an execution of) a symphony is a temporal part of it. On the other side, the play performed by the left side of the orchestra is a spatial part. In both cases, these parts are occurrences themselves. We assume that objects cannot be parts of occurrences, but rather they participate in them. Perdurants extend in time by accumulating different temporal parts, so that, at any time they are present, they are only partially present, in the sense that some of their proper temporal parts (e.g., their previous or future phases) may be not present. E.g., the piece of paper you are reading now is wholly present, while some temporal parts of your reading are not present any more. Philosophers say that endurants are entities that are in time, while lacking however temporal parts (so to speak, all their parts flow with them in time). Perdurants, on the other hand, are entities that happen in time, and can have temporal parts (all their parts are fixed in time).
A physical quality, q-located in (whose value is given within) ordinary spaces (geographical coordinates, cosmological positions, anatomical axes, etc.).
A combinatorial code intended to ordering of information objects involved in the semiotic 'interpretation function'.
An organized collective that receives its organization from the characterizing roles of social interaztion between organisms in a niche.
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A sequential task is a complex task that includes a successor relation among any two component tasks, and does not contain any control task.
The first condition cannot be stated in OWL-DL, because it needs coreference.
An information encoding system is a description that involves information objects. They can be divided into 1) axiomatic systems, which provide roles and operations to define formal descriptions (e.g. theories), 2) combinatorial systems, which provide roles and operations to create valid information objects (e.g. grammars), 3) classification systems, which are contexts of (ev. ordered) lists of information objects, and 4) informal encoding systems, which provide roles and operations to define informal descriptions (e.g. narratives).
An endurant having a direct physical (at least spatial) quality.
We are proposing here a restrictive notion of goal that relies upon its desirability by some agent, which does not necessarily play a role in the execution of the plan the goal is a part of. For example, an agent can have an attitude towards some task defined in a plan, e.g. duty towards, which is different from desiring it (desire towards). We might say that a goal is usually desired by the creator or beneficiary of a plan. The minimal constraint for a goal is that it is a proper part of a plan.
For example, a desire to start a relationship can become a goal if someone takes action (or lets someone else take it for her sake) to obtain it.
Biological collectives are type-based collectives that are *covered* by roles typical of the biological world.
They can be divided into various kinds (genetic, taxonomic, epidemiological, etc.).
Biological properties produce either crisp or fuzzy/probabilistic types.
A scheduling is a task that cannot be executed twice, since it has a temporal parameter restricted to one value, e.g. it classifies an event that is valued by a definite temporal value.
Features are 'parasitic entities', that exist insofar their host exists. Typical examples of features are holes, bumps, boundaries, or spots of color. Features may be relevant parts of their host, like a bump or an edge, or dependent regions like a hole in a piece of cheese, the underneath of a table, the front of a house, or the shadow of a tree, which are not parts of their host. All features are essential wholes, but no common unity criterion may exist for all of them. However, typical features have a topological unity, as they are singular entities.
A placeholder for physical objects that are conceived primarily as places, e.g. wrt their spatial quality.
An activity related to planning. It is sequenced by 'case task', and can contain an infornation gathering activity.
A temporal location quality.
A project is a proactively satisfied method. Differently from a plan, a project includes at least one 'product' role to be played by some endurant (e.g. a house), or one 'result' role played by a perdurant with a definite participant (e.g. a restored state of a house).
Within stative occurrences, we distinguish between states and processes according to homeomericity: sitting is classified as a state but running is classified as a process, since there are (very short) temporal parts of a running that are not themselves runnings.
In general, states differ from situations because they are not assumed to have a description from which they depend. They can be sequenced by some course, but they do not require a description as a unifying criterion.
On the other hand, at any time, one can conceive a description that asserts the constraints by which a state of a certian type is such, and in this case, it becomes a situation.
Since the decision of designing an explicit description that unifies a perdurant depends on context, task, interest, application, etc., when aligning an ontology do DLP, there can be indecision on where to align a state-oriented class.
For example, in the WordNet alignment, we have decided to put only some physical states under 'state', e.g. 'turgor', in order to stress the social orientedness of DLP. But whereas we need to talk explicitly of the criteria by which we conceive turgor states, these will be put under 'situation'.
Similar considerations are made for the other types of perdurants in DOLCE.
A different notion of event (dealing with change) is currently investigated for further developments: being 'achievement', 'accomplishment', 'state', 'event', etc. can be also considered 'aspects' of processes or of parts of them.
For example, the same process 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley' can be conceptualized as an accomplishment (what has brought the current state that e.g. we are trying to explain), as an achievement (the erosion process as the result of a previous accomplishment), as a state (if we collapse the time interval of the erosion into a time point), or as an event (what has changed our focus from a state to another).
In the erosion case, we could have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) condensation d) transition (causality).
If we want to consider all the aspects of a process together, we need to postulate a unifying descriptive set of criteria (i.e. a 'description'), according to which that process is circumstantiated in a 'situation'. The different aspects will arise as a parts of a same situation.
The activity to generate a plan.
A role played by each of two entities at the same time and with the same parameters: e.g. equivalent, neighbor, father.
A particular with no proper parts.
A semiotic role is a non-agentive role defined by the interpretation function.
It should be specialized within a communication setting by a role that is played by some entity in a communication situation.
Semiotic roles are used to fill the universe of the so-called 'interpretation function'.
Two of them are specialized by two communication roles (message and context).
A social description defining roles for the interaction of cognitive agents.
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Within Physical objects, a special place have those those to which we ascribe intentions, beliefs, and desires. These are called Agentive, as opposite to Non-agentive. Intentionality is understood here as the capability of heading for/dealing with objects or states of the world. This is an important area of ontological investigation we haven't properly explored yet, so our suggestions are really very preliminary. A possible modelling of case roles has been started within the descriptions plugin that could be embedded within basic DOLCE. In general, we assume that agentive objects are constituted by non-agentive objects: a person is constituted by an organism, a robot is constituted by some machinery, and so on. Among non-agentive physical objects we have for example houses, body organs, pieces of wood, etc.
A modal description is any part of a description that has a unity criterion consisting in the specification of a modal target (some course), and it can be a right, power, duty, etc.
Notice that modal descriptions can appear in conventionalized descriptions as well as in idiosyncratic assessements, narratives, promises, etc.
A part of a word that is assumed to be sensible to speakers when physically realized by voice.
A phoneme is not necessarily able to express a meaning (description), although it can in principle (e.g. 'a' in English).
A quality inherent in a non-physical endurant.
AKA 'entity'.
Any individual in the DOLCE domain of discourse. The extensional coverage of DOLCE is as large as possible, since it ranges on 'possibilia', i.e all possible individuals that can be postulated by means of DOLCE axioms. Possibilia include physical objects, substances, processes, qualities, conceptual regions, non-physical objects, collections and even arbitrary sums of objects. Extensions of DOLCE included in this ontology also feature 'situations' (qualified reifications of states of affairs).
The description of how a system is produced.
A binding agreement that is possibly enforceable by law.
An activity aimed at gathering information for some purpose. It is typically sequenced by case tasks for taking decisions (can be part of decision activities).
AKA C-Description.
A non-physical object that is defined by a description s, and whose function is classifying entities from a ground ontology in order to build situations that can satisfy s.
A course used to sequence activities or other controllable perdurants (some states, processes), usually within methods.
They must be defined by a method, but can be *used* by other kinds of descriptions.
They are desire targets of some role played by an agent.
Tasks can be complex, and ordered according to an abstract succession relation. Tasks can relate to ground activities or decision making; the last kind deals with typical flowchart content. A task is different both from a flowchart node, and from an action or action type.
Tasks can be considered shortcuts for plans, since at least one role played by an agent has a desire attitude towards them (possibly different from the one that puts the task into action). In principle, tasks could be transformed into explicit plans.
A collection of texts.
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A situation in which an object exists that has been produced according to a system design specification.
A description expressed by a text, and ordered by additional semiotic codes (narratological structures).
An event occurring in the (embodied) mind.
A phenomenon having a physical endurant as participant.
The course of events typical of the life of an object (kind).
An atomic task.
A functional participation relation assuming a relatively static role played by the endurant (e.g. not conceiving a plan, being subjected to some manipulation without involvement, etc.).
Unfortunately, such a notion can't be formalized in general, because it is sensible to the particular plan that drives the action. Possibly, once a rich taxonomy of actions and related personal and social plans is developed, a better axiomatization can be provided.
A spatial location relation holding between any two entities but regions. It assumes a mereotopological association (part, connection, overlaps, etc.) between shared spatial regions.
A relation between a role and a power allowed towards some function/task.
This is dispositional, and implies that a participation classified by this relation is an 'empowered participation'.
A perdurant p1 results from another one p2 if they are sequenced within a same course, if a same endurant participates in both perdurants, and if p1 follows p2.
iteration interval can be used to state how much time should be taken by each iteration of the looped activity
This relation constrains participation within the scope of a description: a perdurant is participated by an object according to a description and its components.
When there is an 'epistemological layering', i.e. a description d involves another description d' (one of the roles in d classifies d'), a situation that satisfies d', will be in the scope of d as well.
For example, a judgment procedure will have a legal case in its scope, but being a legal case depends on satisfying some legal description not identical to that procedure.
Another example: a plan assessment is a technique to evaluate a plan execute, and the assessment 'has in scope' the plan execution.
Adoption holding for goals.
The relation between a plan and its main goal.
A relation between a goal and the main goal of the plan it is a subgoal of. Usable for talking of dependencies between goals.
The perdurant p has a participant e that constantly participates in p with all its parts, e.g. in 'I played the concert' (where the concert is a solo concert).
Analytical location holding between physical endurants and physical regions.
Being component at time t. It holds for endurants only. This is important to model components that can change or be lost over time without affecting the identity of the whole.
A relation of approximate location holding between any endurant and physical endurants. It assumes a shared physical region. Sharedness can be any mereotopological association, but no analytical definition can be done in OWL due to the lack of role value maps.
A double composition is needed here for linking situations and descriptions components, since many possible constituents could be available in the situation. The first one constrains the classifies relation through description components, the second one constrains it through situation constituents.
The immediate relation holding between endurants and perdurants (e.g. in 'the car is running').
Participation can be constant (in all parts of the perdurant, e.g. in 'the car is running'), or temporary (in only some parts, e.g. in 'I'm electing the president').
A 'functional' participant is specialized for those forms of participation that depend on the nature of participants, processes, or on the intentionality of agentive participants. Traditional 'thematic role' should be mapped to functional participation.
For relations holding between participants in a same perdurant, see the co-participates relation.
A regulation states reified conditions on how a situation should look like. Regulations are mostly taken as descriptions for the social world.
The immediate relation holding for qualities and entities at time t.
A role r characterizes a collection c when proper subsets of the members of c play different roles r,...,rn that are all used by a same description or deputed by a same figure.
The physical 'origin' of a physical endurant in the space region of the spatial quality of another physical endurant.
Figures can depute roles that are played by endurants that are supposed to 'act for' the figure.
An important relation between agents and descriptions is creation, implying that the description is *specifically* dependent on a (cognitive) agent.
C-SAT - like R-SAT - concerns entities that exist in a situation entirely prior to the description. Moreover, it assumes redundant satisfaction. But, differently from P-SAT and R-SAT, no qualified satisfaction is assumed. In fact, C-SAT implies no dependency of a situation on its description. C-SAT typically applies to different views of existing situations, as for regulative descriptions (disclaimer: the situation can be already created by complying to the regulation, e.g executing it as a plan, but in this case there actually exists a plan that has the regulation as part), narratives, symbolic interpretations, etc.
The basic connection, not requiring a common boundary.
Temporal overlap: having a (partly) common temporal location.
A functional participation relation that assumes a meet relation between an activity and the life of an endurant.
Unfortunately, such a notion can't be formalized in general, because it is sensible to the particular project that drives the action. Possibly, once a rich taxonomy of actions and related personal and social plans is developed, a better axiomatization can be provided.
Two tasks contained in the same plan.
The mediated relation between an entity and a parameter through the region at which the entity is localized and that is the value for the parameter.
Specialization as reification of a partial-order relation between social objects.
For example, some concepts that are apparently classified by other concepts, e.g. a manager that plays the role of buyer, actually specializes the role buyer.
Descriptions are specialized by other descriptions that specialize their concepts or figures. For descriptions, an intention to specialize must be present (unless purely formal theories are considered, but even in this case a criterion of relevance is usually active).
Specialization does not imply expansion (proper part) for descriptions.
If there exists a concept that is defined by the specialized description, which is not d-used in the specializing one, the second only specializes a part of the the first
If there exists a concept that is defined by the specializing description, which is not d-used by the specialized one, the first both specializes and expands the second.
The composition of d-uses and sequences relations: a description d-uses a course that sequences a perdurant.
P-SAT assumes two satisfaction semantics: redundant satisfaction and qualified satisfaction. In order to allow for a correct implementation of the qualified satisfaction, P-SAT requires that the description exists prior to at least some of the entities in the setting of the satisfying situation. Ontologically, it results that P-SAT also implies a specific dependency of the situation on its description.
P-SAT typically applies to plans, projects, designs, methods, techniques, game rules, instructions, punishment rules, constitutive descriptions, sanctions, and strategies.
A sample P-SAT qualified satisfaction axiom for plans is given in OWL.
A relation between information objects that are used as representations (signs) and the content (meaning, conceptualization) they represent, in this ontology content is reified as a 'description'.
Information objects are 'systemic' objects created by the system of rules of a semiotic code.
For the representation between the physical implementation of information objects (physical representations) and information objects, the 'realized-by' relation is used.
Participation in a state.
A boundary here is taken to be a part (mereological treatment). Consequently, in the case of endurants, (reified) boundaries are features.
All temporal locations of perdurant x are also temporal locations of perdurant y.
A relation that composes other relations. For example, a participation relation composed with a representation relation.
Composed relation cannot be directly expressed in OWL-DL, then (at least some) compositions are expressed as class or restriction axioms.
'Component' is a proper part with a role (or function) in a system or a context. Roles can be different for the same entity, and the evaluation of them changes according to the kind of entity. For instance, components of endurants can 'play functional roles' in a whole, while components of perdurants are the essential 'episodes' in their whole.
As a functional part relation, component is not transitive, because functions depend on intentions and/or designs, and something intentionally essential for a direct whole, can be non-essential for another, indirect whole.
Two or more collections can be extensionally equivalent and still not be the same collection. Each collection needs a unifying description which provides its intensional identity criterion:
(D11) ExtensionallyEquivalent(x,y) =df Collection(x) ? Collection(y) ? ?z,t. Membership(z,x,t) ? Membership(z,y,t)
Being part at time t. It holds for endurants only. This is important to model parts that can change or be lost over time without affecting the identity of the whole. In FOL, this is expressed as a ternary relation, but in DLs we only can reason with binary relations, then only the necessary axiom of compresence is represented here.
Exit condition can be used to state what deliberation task causes to exit a cycle.
R-SAT assumes redundant satisfaction and qualified satisfaction, but it works out that semantics with entities in the situation that entirely exist prior to the description.
This seems paradoxical, since a description hardly motivates what happens if it is not present to any agent involved in things happening. For this reason, we postulate a so-called specific retroactive dependency (SRD), meaning that the creator of the description is willing to attribute the status of a scientific law to that description, despite it could not be present before the situation. R-SAT typically applies to explanations that are considered as well-founded in science (physical, social, or cognitive), reverse engineering, criminal investigation, etc. Consider that the actual validity of the explanation is not addressed by the description, but by external evaluation descriptions.
A task can be discarded within some plan. In this case, it is ignored in plan execution without affecting the satisfaction of the plan. A discarded task can appear only as a direct successor to a deliberation task.
A functional participation relation holding between agents and actions.
It catches the everyday language notion of being the initiator of an action, or having a leading or primary role.
Unfortunately, such a notion can't be formalized in general, because it is sensible to the particular plan that drives the action. Possibly, once a rich taxonomy of actions and related personal and social plans is developed, a better axiomatization can be provided.
The execution of a task (an action classified by it) can make a new situation emerge: in this case the task has a task-postcondition.
An endurant of type e1 metaphorically plays a role (defined in a description d2), when that role comes from a metaphorical mapping between the description d1 that grants a unity criterion to endurants of type e1, and another description d2 that grants a unity criterion to endurants of type e2.
The immediate relation holding for qualities and entities.
The immediate relation holding for features and entities.
A quality having a q-location at an atomic region.
The part relation between a particular and an atom.
The relation between agents and information objects. In order to interpret something, an agent should conceive a description that results to be 'expressed by' that information object.
Interprets implies that an expressed description is conceived by the agent (i.e., when an agent interprets an IO, it conceives of a description expressed by the IO; of course two agents can conceive of different descriptions, then resulting in different interpretations):
Interprets(x,y,t) ? ?d. Description(d) ? Expresses(y,d,t) ? ConceivesOf(x,d,t)
A situation is a post-condition of the execution of a method (and of its tasks) when it is a successor (however succession is interpreted, although temporal interpretation is the usual one) of that execution, and is constituted by a subset of the individuals that constitute the execution situation. For example, a surgical guideline describes how to carry out a heart transplant: its (expected) execution situation is constituted by the perdurants, endurants, and regions described by the guideline, while its post-condition situation might be only constituted by the transplanted heart, its anatomical and morphological environment, the physiological functions in which it participates, and some physiological values. But the devices used during the transplantation and the surgeon can be external to the post-condition situation. This definition does not cover the possibility of a post-condition having constituents that are not involved in the description. This is a difficult issue. A possible solution is that such post-conditions are actually referenced by other descriptions that -for instance- 'control' the outcome of a procedure, or 'reconstruct' a set of events under an independent unity criterion. If this solution is applicable, such post-conditions would be maximal situations requiring the composition (bundle) of two or more related descriptions.
Descriptions can d-use (descriptively use) concepts or figures, provided that used ones are defined by some description.
Figures are not dependent on roles defined or used in the same descriptions they are defined or used, but they can act because they depute some powers to some of those roles. In other words, a figure classified by some agentive role can play that role because there are other roles in the descriptions that define or use the figure. Those roles classify endurants that result to act for the figure:
DeputedBy(r,f) ? Role(r) ? Figure(f) ? ?d. Description(d) ? Uses(d,r) ? Uses(d,f)
DeputedBy(r,f) ? ?r1. Role(r1) ? Selects(r1,f)
ActsFor(e,f) ? ?r. Role(r) ? DeputedBy(r,f) ? Selects(r,e)
For example, an employee acts for an organization that deputes the role (e.g. turner) that classifies the employee. Simply put, a guy working as a turner at FIAT acts for (or on behalf of) FIAT.
In complex figures, like organizations or societies, a total agency is possible when an endurant plays a delegate, or representative role of the figure.
A location relation bounded to regions and defined analytically through the composition of inherence and q-location. This is the analytical version of 'generic location'.
The dependence on an individual of a given type at some time. This is traditionally a relation between particulars and universals, but this one states that x generically depends on y if a z different from y, but with the same properties, can be equivalently its depend-on.
This is a temporally-indexed relation (embedded in this syntax).
An amount of matter can be a resource in some activity, if it has some role bound to the course that sequences the activity in a same description (typically a plan).
Referring to something is assumed here under a 'negotiated reference' approach, i.e. agents refer to entities by conceiving a description appropriate to context:
RefersTo(x,y,t) ? Agent(x) ? Entity(y) ? ?z,d. InformationObject(z) ? Description(d) ? Interprets(x,z,t) ? Expresses(z,d,t) ? About(z,y,t)
Any mediated relation that composes temporal locations of perdurants with mereotopological relations between those locations.
Mereotopological relations are those specified in the J. Allen's theory of time intervals.
The constant dependence between two individuals. Taken here as primitive.
A last part of a perdurant (any part that includes the 'final' boundary, but not the 'initial' one.
A relation of approximate location holding for physical endurants. It assumes a physical region that is shared by two physical endurants. Sharedness can be any mereotopological association, but no analytical definition can be done in OWL due to the lack of role value maps.
Anti-transitive succession.
Only some parts of the perdurant p have a participant e.
In fact, participation can be constant (in all parts of the perdurant, e.g. in 'the car is running'), or temporary (in only some parts, e.g. in 'I'm electing the president').
Implicitly, this relation has a temporal indexing.
If needed, in OWL one can derive such indexing by expliciting what parts of p have e as _constant_ participant.
An appropriate OWL axiom is created to bind this relation to a proper part of it, which has the temporary-participant as a constant one.
This is the immediate relation between courses and perdurants. A course can be either atomic, being a simple 'perdurant role', or it can be complex, thus creating an abstract ordering over a temporal or causal sequence of processes or actions.
The ontology of plans develops in detail intentional complex courses.
The use relations between endurants: an endurant e1 uses e2 within a perdurant in which both are participating.
A rule then states that if e1 uses e2, e2 is used *in* a perdurant.
The role shared by all members of a collection has a covering relation towards the collection.
A generic attitude relation that holds between agentive functional roles and tasks.
This is used here as a shortcut for saying that someone participates to some action with a plan in mind, and desiring it. An analytic account of this relation requires an explicit plan, and that the course be a goal inside that plan.
The acronym 'bdi' in the name is for 'belief, desire, intention', a well known model of deliberation used in many agent architectures.
The intuition goes to the deliberative agent as something that, provided it has the belief _p_, the desire to have _q_, and the intention to do _r_ in order to get _q_, then it is ready to deliberate an action.
Here it is as a placeholder, wating for a more comprehensive ontological theory that takes into account not only BDI, but also the details of interacting, cooperative, competitive agents in the context of complex social and legal modalities of action.
This is a simple summary of how BDI is usually understood and implemented in information systems:
- According to Wooldridge and Jennings, strong agents can possess mental attitudes.
- According to the BDI paradigm, the current state of entities and environment as perceived by the agent (preconditions) are the agent's beliefs.
- Desires are some future states that an agent would like to be in. Desires are sometimes called goals.
- Intentions are some commitment of an agent to achieve a goal by progressing along a particular future path that leads to the goal. Such path is sometimes called a plan.
- One advantage with using intentions is that the effort associated with creating them needs not be repeated every time they are required. Intentions can be pre-computed and cached. Each intention can be tagged with a trigger describing some situation in which this intention should be accessed and applied.
- In a typical BDI paradigm, deliberation is done through the selection of a goal, the selection of a plan that will be used to form an intention, the selection of an intention, and the execution of the selected intention. All these decisions are based on the beliefs the agent has about the current state of the environment. The process of selecting the plan is known as means-end reasoning.
By strong connection here we mean a connection between two entities that share a boundary.
Mereological sibling: having a common whole
An institution enforces a regulation by playing a role within the part of that regulation that describes its enforcement.
A task (as any other concept) can be optional within some plan (or any description). In this case, it can be ignored in plan execution without affecting the satisfaction of the plan.
Of course, within plans an optional task should be placed in a way that preserves the topology (the connectedness) of the maximal task: in fact, an optional task can appear only as a direct successor to a concurrent task or an any order task.
A relation for composing regions by means of a reference metrics. One of them (the measurement unit) should be explicitly used to represent a measurement space.
We define a disposition relation between the roles used in a plan having a main goal, and the influenced goal.
For example, the role 'eater' can have a disposition to being satiated, meaning that a person playing the role of eater that adopts that plan can act in order to be satiated.
Disposition relation is useful to account for those cases in which a task addressed by a role is not internal to the plan, but the plan is a subplan of another one in which that task is represented as a full-fledged goal.
The satisfaction (SAT) relation holds between situations and descriptions, and implies that at least some components in a description must select at least some entity in the situation setting.
This constraint is very poor, and for specialised descriptions additional constraints should be given in order to reason over the satisfaction of candidate situations (see below the constraints for plans).
Notice that we do not constrain situations to include only entities classified by description components. This assumption may seem rough (redundant situations will exist), but real world uses of D&S have shown that most situations derive from pre-existing situations that already have an internal structure, and depriving them under the sole purpose of getting non-redundant situations seems a bad practice. In addition, the same practice usually applies to physical objects: provided that they respect some basic properties, any other property results acceptable.
Under this assumption, the same situation can satisfy different descriptions that can even be unrelated.
These considerations make us feel entitled to claim that D&S can be applied as an ontology of systems. As a matter of fact, a system builds upon existing structures, be it in the physical (natural systems, material artifacts), social (organizations, societies), or cognitive world (knowledge). In order to talk about systems, we need one or more reference layer(s) of elements, usually coming with their own structural (and even functional) organization, which are assembled according to the systemÕs functional constraints.
The many-layered nature of D&S seems to fit this necessity, specially because the elements belonging to different layers are allowed to coexist in the same ontological domain.
In order to get a clear semantical foundation of (functional) constraints when they appear in a domain together with physical objects, events, and qualities, we exploit the logical mechanism of reification.
The semantics of reified theories and models that we are willing to accept for D&S models can be summarized as follows.
Roughly speaking, when dealing with e.g. a theory T, a model M of T must satisfy the axioms of T, so that each individual is an instance of a class defined in T, and each tuple must be allowed by constraints encoded in the axioms of T. If a tuple in M generates a contradiction in T, M is not a model of T. If an individual in M is not an instance of any class in T, or a tuple in M involves individuals for which classes that relations is not defined in T, then M is undecidable in T.
When moving to D&S, more possibilities arise:
¥ purely reified satisfaction: this simple case corresponds to theory satisfaction: each entity in a situation S must be classified by a concept in a description D, and each tuple asserted between the entities of S must correspond to some relation between concepts (attitude towards, requisite for, successor, etc.) in D. No further individuals and tuples are allowed in S.
¥ redundant reified satisfaction: in this case one may accept that there are entities and tuples in S which do not correspond to concepts and relations in D; in practice, we accept to have undecidable models for a theory.
¥ structure matching satisfaction: in this case, each concept in D must classify an entity in S, and each relation between concepts in D corresponds to appropriate relations in S; in practice, we use a theory as a protocol instead of a set of constraints over possible world models: the world in S must conform to D.
¥ qualified satisfaction: in this case a set of axioms is provided that specifies what part of the structure in D must be matched by S; in practice, this is also a structure matching, but some concepts and relations in D are considered either optional, or discarded by decision.
With reference to these cases of satisfaction, D&S relies on redundant satisfaction between situations and descriptions, and also on qualified satisfaction for specialised descriptions, such as plans (see OWL axiom for a sample qualified satisfaction for plans).
Although this seems to give room for undecidable models, it is not really so, because the parts of the models that do not correspond to the concepts and the axioms of the description are nonetheless decidable within the so-called ground ontology.
For example, if we have a model of the ground ontology that represents some guy with a red jacket driving his car at an excessive speed, and we add a legal regulation to the ontology, containing some constraints for speed limits, driving, vehicles, and drivers, a situation can be constructed from that model which obeys those constraints, except for the red jacket, which is anyway already decided within the ground ontology. Therefore, no redundant entity or tuple in a situation can lead to (potential) undecidability, provided that those entities and tuples are decidable in the ground ontology.
A basic typology for the satisfaction relation between situations and descriptions, leveraging on the semantical distinctions is provided here. P-SAT means proactively satisfies, R-SAT means retroactively satisfies, and C-SAT means constructively satisfies (see individual resp. comments).
A relation for representing regions within other regions, e.g. in measurement spaces (space composition).
The result of r-location composition is a new 'composed region', which can either preserve the same region type (e.g. physical+physical->physical, or physical+abstract->physical), or not (e.g. physical+abstract->abstract). See 'composition description' for more details.
In some cases, space composition is conventional, i.e. a space is just 'located' at another space, as in the case of measurement spaces:
(direct composition):
r r-location r1
In other cases, r-location implies a complex path, e.g. :
(homogeneous composition):
r q-location-of q inherent-in x has-quality q1 q-location r1
(heterogeneous composition across endurants and perdurants):
r q-location-of q inherent-in e participant-in p has-quality q1 q-location r1
(heterogeneous composition across physical and non-physical endurants):
r q-location-of q inherent-in pe specific-constant-dependent npe has-quality q1 q-location r1
Descriptions define either concepts or (social) figures. Once defined, they can be d-used by other descriptions.
A situation is a pre-condition of the execution of a method (and of its tasks) when it is a predecessor (however succession is interpreted, although temporal interpretation is the usual one) of that execution, and is constituted by a subset of the individuals that constitute the execution situation. For example, a surgical guideline describes how to carry out a heart transplant: its (expected) execution situation is constituted by the perdurants, endurants, and regions described by the guideline, while its pre-condition situation might be only constituted by the heart to be removed, the one to be transplanted, their anatomical and morphological environment, the physiological functions in which they participates, and some physiological values. But the devices used during the transplantation and the surgeon might (or might not) be external to the pre-condition situation. This definition does not cover the possibility of a pre-condition having constituents that are not involved in the description. This is a difficult issue. A possible solution is that such pre-conditions are actually referenced by other descriptions that -for instance- 'control' the feasibility of a procedure, or 'analyze' a set of events under an independent unity criterion. If this solution is applicable, such pre-conditions would be 'maximal' situations requiring the 'composition' of two or more related descriptions.
Adoption holding for plans.
Concepts and figures can be refined by adding components, e.g. an elementary task can become complex, a complex task can increase its complexity, maximal tasks can be composed, etc.
A description gests expanded if one of the concepts of figures it uses are refined.
Causal precedence between two perdurants, as a kind of temporal precedence. Additional constraints (circumstantial, structural, etc.) are postulated for each occurrence of causal precedence. This is implemented by means of a causal description, which d-uses at least two courses that are related by a causal predecessor relation (ongoing work), and roles and parameters that specify the constraints.
A relation between a role and a right allowance towards some function/task.
This is dispositional, and implies that a participation classified by this relation is a 'righteous participation'.
The relation between roles and courses. Modal target subrelations can be seen as 'reifications' of the operators of modal logics.
The relation between a situation and the entities that constitute it. (At least some of, or all) such entities must be classified by concepts defined by the description that the situation is supposed to satisfy.
A highly mediated relation used to talk of the endurant(s) that is roughly associated to the regions in which the constituents of a situation are located. The locator endurant is supposed to be a situation constituent on its own.
The perdurant p has a participant e that temporarily participates in p with all its parts, e.g. in 'I played the concert' (where I actually played just an ouverture).
See also 'temporary-participant'.
The place of a perdurant as provided by a reference region at which the spatial quality of a certain endurant is q-located.
Being proper part at time t. It holds for endurants only. This is important to model proper parts that can change or be lost over time without affecting the identity of the whole.
AKA 'co-occurs'. Temporal coincidence between perdurants.
A partial order relation that holds between descriptions. It represents the proper part relation between a description and another description featuring the same properties of the former, with at least an additional one.
Descriptions can be expanded either by adding other descriptions as parts.
Specializing the concepts or figures that are d-used by them is on the contrary a case of 'specialization'.
For descriptions, an intention to expand must be present (unless purely formal theories are considered, but even in this case a criterion of relevance is usually active).
A.K.A. 'selects'.
The referencing relation between concepts defined by descriptions, and constituents of situations.
It can be understood as a reification of a 'satisfiability' relation holding between elements of theories and elements of models.
It has a time index, but this should not be intended as a partial compresence, since the time only refers to a part of the classified particular life or extension.
An activity expected by a method.
A method can exploit an involved endurant when it plays a device-like role.
The proper part relation: irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive.
Having an atom as part at a time t.
a.k.a. support.
A physical representation (p. endurant, p. perdurant, p. quality, p. region, or p. situation) realizes a non-physical object according to a system of rules.
The main use of this relation is between information objects and the entities through which information objects are used and interpreted. E.g. a paper copy of the 1861 edition of Dante's Comedy, with DorÕs illustrations, realizes the Comedy (as an information object).
There is a sense in which any entity that realizes an IO also realizes an IO about itself.
For example, a painting realizing information about a woman also realizes information about itself.
Of course, the converse of the previous axiom does not hold in general.
For example, the information about a woman can be realized by entities different from that woman (as when referring to an absent woman).
In other words, an entity (in a semiotic perspective) always realizes two information objects: one about itself, and another about something else. In the non-semiotic cases, the information objects are identical (an entity only realizes information about itself).
Therefore entities, once they have a relevance in a society, can have semiotic properties. Even physical artifacts that are not built primarily for communicative purposes Ð e.g. a chair Ð can be considered as realizing some IO that expresses a design description (cf. system-design), and is about a context (situation) of use, fruition, or just affordance that satisfies the design.
'Constituent' should depend on some layering of the ontology. For example, scientific granularities or ontological 'strata' are typical layerings. A constituent is a part belonging to a lower layer. Since layering is actually a partition of the ontology, constituents are not properly classified as parts, although this kinship can be intuitive for common sense. Example of specific constant constituents are the entities constituting a setting (a situation), whilethe entities constituting a collection are examples of generic constant constituents.
Perdurant presence (happening) is axiomatized as being temporally located at a point in one's life.
The "classified by" relations holding between regions and parameters. At least one region is supposed to be a value for a parameter.
An important relation between agents and descriptions is adoption, requiring previous creation by any agent, and conceiving by the same agent. It can involve an actual desire to perform the possibly expected actions, or not.
The relation between information objects and entities they are about. The difference with 'expresses' is that the last requires a situation to be about something.
E.g. Dante's Comedy is about facts like DanteÕs travel to the hereafter. The Comedy expresses a script as well as various related meanings, while the facts talked about are not 'expressed'.
Given that descriptions are expressed by at least one IO, and that interpretations of IOs requires conceiving a description, and the (plausible) claim that being about something can only be done in context, i.e. within a situation, we can propose that the conceived description is satisfied by the situation (the context) of the entity the IO is about:
About(x,y,t) ? ?d,s. Description(d) ? Expresses(x,d,t) ? Situation(s) ? SettingFor(s,y) ? SAT(s,d)
On this basis, about would result to be a mediated relation. This is still a proposal, then we keep about here as a primitive for some time.
The most generic location relation, probably equivalent to more than one image schema in a cognitive system (e.g. containment for exact location, proximity for approximate location).
This is meant to reason on generalized, common sense as well as formal locations, including naive localization, between any kinds of entities.
Generic location is branched into 'exact' location, ranging on regions, and 'approximate' (naive) location, ranging on non-regions.
Being a (generic, temporary) constituent in a countable collection, for example: member of a society, bacterium in a colony, etc.
The most generic part relation, reflexive, asymmetric, and transitive.
To be understood as 'entity x has predecessor y'.
This is the transitive version, but it results to be a complex property in OWL-DL, and transitivity should be overruled.
Analytical location holding between non-physical endurants and abstract regions.
A perdurant can have some information object as patient participant, e.g. in a communication activity.
'Constituent' should depend on some layering of the ontology. For example, scientific granularities or ontological 'strata' are typical layerings. A constituent is a part belonging to a lower layer. Since layering is actually a partition of the ontology, constituents are not properly classified as parts, although this kinship can be intuitive for common sense. Example of specific constant constituents are the entities constituting a setting (a situation), whilethe entities constituting a collection are examples of generic constant constituents.
The part relation between political (non-physical) geographic objects. It is assumed here as a region-sharing (between their physical depend-ons) relation.
Approximate location of an endurant in a non-physical one. It assumes a shared region.
AKA fiat-place.
Original location of an endurant in a non-physical one. It assumes a shared region between the first and the depend-on of the second (see descriptive place).
Anytime x is present, x has participant y. In other words, all parts of x have a same participant.
Participation can be constant (in all parts of the perdurant, e.g. in 'the car is running'), or temporary (in only some parts, e.g. in 'I'm electing the president').
A relation between a role and a duty binding towards some function/task.
This is dispositional, and implies that a participation classified by this relation is a 'due participation'.
The power of enforcing a plan of action to other agents.
Requisites are constraints over the attributes of entities. Within D&S, a requisite-for relation holds between parameters (that bound regions to certain value ranges), and either roles , figures or courses.
When a situation satisfies a description with parameters, endurants and perdurants that constitute the situation must have attributes that range within the boundaries stated by parameters (in DOLCE terms, entities must have qualities that are mapped to certain value ranges of regions).
This is the immediate relation between roles and endurants. A role classifies the position (function, use, relevance, ...) of an endurant within a context (description).
Roles can be ordered, interdependent, at different layers. etc.
Mereological overlap: having a common part.
A modal relation expressing that an agent conceives a description by 'desiring' a certain course of events.
The time interval of duration of a perdurant.
A relation holding between two endurants participating in a same perdurant. This typically subsumes many common sense, verbally encoded, relations, such as "making", "moving", "transforming", etc.
Analytical indirect location holding between perdurants and space regions.
Having a common atomic temporal location.
A functional usage participation relation holding between activities and physical objects.
It catches the everyday language notion of being the tool, support or devisce of an action.
Unfortunately, such a notion can't be formalized in general, because it is sensible to the particular plan that drives the action. Possibly, once a rich taxonomy of actions and related personal and social plans is developed, a better axiomatization can be provided.
Temporal connection between perdurants: p1 ending part is connected to p2 beginning part.
A functional participation relation holding between activities and targeted endurants.
It catches the everyday language notion of being the destination of an action.
Unfortunately, such a notion can't be formalized in general, because it is sensible to the particular plan that drives the action. Possibly, once a rich taxonomy of actions and related personal and social plans is developed, a better axiomatization can be provided.
Presence is axiomatized as being temporally located in a part of one's life.
The execution of a task (an action classified by it) can require that a situation holds: in this case the task has a task-precondition.
The immediate relation holding for qualities and regions. See 'generic location' branching for the various mediated relations that embed q-location.
Targeting at an endurant, which in principle can avoid bearing modifications.
A control relation between socially constructed persons and either roles or figures. It requires that the socially constructed person is explicitly enabled to control in a description that d-uses both the socially constructed person and the controlled roles or figures.
Analytical indirect location holding between endurants and temporal regions.
A modality characterized by a low commitment, and bearing modifications to the player of the role, or the figure.
x participates in some of y's parts.
Having the same parts at time t.
A particular case of an endurant participating in a perdurant that meets (is connected to the beginning of) the life of another endurant.
Analytical location holding between physical perdurants and temporal regions.
A beginning part of a perdurant (any part that includes the 'initial' boundary, but not the 'final' one.
To be understood as 'entity x has successor y'. Succession does not exclude connection, but it excludes overlapping.
It can be direct or indirect, and assumes a choice (temporal, spatial, abstract, etc.) Cf. the cognitive 'path' schema.
This is the transitive version, but it results to be a complex property in OWL-DL, and transitivity is expressed by an axiom.
Analytical location holding between physical endurants and spatial regions.
Analytical indirect location holding between non-physical endurants and space regions.
This relation supports the representation of conceptual regions by information objects. It is defined as a composed relation: an information object is expressed according to an information encoding description that maps a quality space. In other words, this means that a representation of conceptual regions within quality spaces requires an explicit conceptualization of the dimensions operating in the quality space. In still other words, a quality space can be mapped to a theory, which can be reified as a special kind of 'information encoding description'.
A subgoal (relative to a plan) is a goal that is a part of a subplan.
A goal is not necessarily a part of the main goal of the plan it is a subgoal of. E.g. consider the goal: being satiated; eating food can be a subgoal of the plan that has being satiated as its main goal, but it is not a part of being satiated.
See also relations: influence, disposition to.
A functional participation relation assuming a total constant participation, beyond certain roles and courses defined by a description.
The composition of d-uses and valued-by relations: a description d-uses a parameter that is valued by a region.
Based on characterizing roles, collections specifically depend on some description:
Collection(c) ? ?d. Description(d) ? SpecificallyDependsOn(c,d)
We can therefore build a new relation of unification between collections and the descriptions on which they depend. Unification is axiomatized by means of sufficient conditions, and is not temporalized, since changing the description (differently from changing some members) creates a new collection:
Unifies(x,y) ? Description(x) ? Collection(y)
Covers(x,y) ? ?d. Description(x) ? Uses(d,x) ? Unifies(d,y)
Characterizes(x,y) ? ?d. Description(x) ? Uses(d,x) ? Unifies(d,y)
(Characterizes(x,y) ? ?f. Deputes(f,x)) ? ?d. Description(x) ? Uses(d,f) ? Unifies(d,y)
It is the immediate relation between roles or figures, and tasks. It is the descriptive counterpart of the 'participant-in' relation for agentive roles or figures.
In other words, it is used to state attitudes, attention or even subjection that an object can have wrt an action or process.
Formally, a modality target is a task that sequences a perdurant that has a participant that plays a role bound to that modality target with a certain modality.
For example, a person is usually obliged to drive in a way that prevents hurting other persons. Or a person can have the right to express her ideas.
Another, more complex example: a BDI application to a certain ordered set of tasks including initial conditions (beliefs), final conditions (desires), and ways to reach goals (intentions). In other words, to move from beliefs to goals is a way of bounding one or more agent(s) to a sequence of actions.
The relation between agents and descriptions. Agents have mental states and produce conceptualizations, here corresponding to 'descriptions'.
It has a time index, but this should not be intended as a partial compresence, since the time only refers to a part of the agent's life in which it conceptualizes the description.
Preliminarily, conceives is here an immediate (primitive) relation, but other options are under study.
The first involves mediating conception through an ontology of mental states and events, while the second is semiotic: since descriptions are expressed by at least one information object, conceiving requires at least one creation/interpretation of an information object, therefore conceives is a 'mediated' relation.
a.k.a. 'expressed according to'. The relation between information objects and the languages, codes, grammars, etc. that they are ordered by. E.g. Dante's Comedy is ordered by Middle Age Italian language.
A composed (mediated) relation used here to make relations 'temporary': by adding it as a superrelation, the effect is that the two related endurants cannot be present at all the same time intervals, but are compresent at least at some time interval (see related axiom).
In FOL, the same constraint can be stated directly by coreference.
This workaround can be used to index time of relations that involve reciprocal dependency, but it cannot be used in general with relations involving multiple strata of reality. For example, _about_ relation can be temporally indexed, without involving that the time of the information object overlaps with the time of the entity the information is about (but this works for e.g. the _realizes_ relation between information objects and entities whatsoever). The different temporal constraints of about vs. expresses probably derive from the dependency of aboutness from conception (to be about x, an information object should also express a description d that is satisfied by a situation including x, then temporal overlapping of _about_ is true in virtue of d).
A relation holding between non-physical objects and entities whatsoever (thus including non-physical objects themselves).
An intuition for the references relation could be that a non-physical object adds 'information' to an entity. In fact, non-physical objects depend on a communication setting.
In most cases, this is the characteristic relation that provides a (functional) unity criterion to objects, events, etc. For example, cars are objects and not mere aggregates because there is a project, a design, a social value, a functional structure, a personal emotional structure, etc. attached to them. This attachment can be represented by means of 'non-physical objects' that 'reference' cars.
The most obvious application is for situations, which do not exist without a description, although they still are extensional entities: a situation without a part is no more the same situation, but a situation is not a mere aggregate, since it has references to a description as its unity criterion.
Adding information to an entity can also be thought as an intentional solution to a holistic stance. Defenders of this view -within different frameworks- are Kant, Brentano, Husserl, Gestalt psychologists, Merleau-Ponty ...
References is distinguished according to the kinds of non-physical objects and referenced ground entities: referencing between descriptions and situations is called 'SATISFIED-BY', while referencing between description components and situation constituents is called 'CLASSIFIES'.
'EXPRESSES' is bound to information objects and the meaning (description of a conceptualization) in which they are involved.
'REALIZED-BY' is bound to information objects and physical representations that are used to communicate them, etc.
'ABOUT' is bound to information objects and entities whatsoever (aboutness of intentionality).
Presence of a physical quality when inheres in an endurant.
A relation that holds without additional mediating individuals. In logical terms, a non-composed relation.
See also comment on 'satisfies' for a different explanation.
This is the primitive relation between descriptions and situations. It can be understood as a reification of the 'satisfiability' relation of formal semantics that holds between theories and models.
A theory is reified as an description, thus acquiring a life-cycle: a theory can be changed, versioned, discussed, issued, etc.
'Theory' can be a 'potential' theory in the sense that most conceptualizations that could be formalized, could also be reified, e.g. plans, norms, stories, projects, diagnoses, methods, etc.
No position is taken on the extensionality of descriptions. For example, if a theory is required to be reified in fine detail, if it changes an axiom, it could be considered no more the same theory. On the other hand, if theories are reified without such a strong assumption, some axioms can be changed just like non-essential parts of physical objects, with the theory preserving its identity. In case a theory is considered extensional, it might be considered a member of a class of 'theory changing history'. The 'refines' relation provides this possibility.
A model is reified as a situation, thus a *class* of models that can satisfy a theory are reified as a situation type (class). Situations can depend on descriptions, but not vice-versa (constructivist stance). Components of descriptions 'classify' entities of situations.
There are at least three satisfaction subrelations, and a lot of conditions can be stated for allowing an automatic matching of satisfaction. See the FOL version of DLP for details.
A functional participation between an action and an endurant that supports the goals of a performer.
It catches the everyday language notion of being exploited during an action by someone/something that initiates or leads it.
Unfortunately, such a notion can't be formalized in general, because it is sensible to the particular plan that drives the action. Possibly, once a rich taxonomy of actions and related personal and social plans is developed, a better axiomatization can be provided.
The composition of d-uses and played-by relations: a description d-uses a role that is played by an endurant.
Anti-transitive predecessor.
iteration cardinality can be used to state in a task how many times an action should be repeated
A relation to compose a quality space with a numeric ordering at the symbol level. In practice, it enables to associate a nember data type to a region.
Similar to a generic annotation property. To be used when annotations can be incompatible with an ontology project.
Temporal precedence between two perdurants. No further dependence is implied (e.g. mereological, causal).
Any pair of individuals are notionally identical iff they instantiate all and only the same concepts.
Any pair of individuals are ontologically identical if they are identical to themselves. This is the non-extrinsic TBox version of the 'identity' relation. Reflexive, symmetric, and transitive.
Total constant participation applied to the mereological sum of the perdurants in which an endurant participates.