I was abroad these last weeks, and unable then to follow this thread with
the necessary attention. It seems however evident to me that, when dealing
contemporaneously with terms like "ontology" and "event", one should have at
least a look at NKRL (Narrative Knowledge Representation Language). NKRL is,
in fact, a language and software environment expressly created for dealing
in a somewhat 'intelligent' way with "narratives", i.e., in practice, with
streams of (complex) events.
To do this, NKRL makes use of two different ontologies, a 'standard'
(binary) one for dealing with 'static notions' like, among other things,
"objects and persons participating in events", and an n-ary one for
describing general classes of events like "moving an object", "making a
trip", "starting a company", "having a positive/negative attitude
for/against someone/something", "living in a place", "receiving some money",
"feeling ill" etc. Of course, NKRL is also endowed with all sort of
conceptual tools to represent temporal information and event correlations
("connectivity phenomena"), and with high-level inference tools. Interested
people can consult my recent (Springer, 2009) book on this subject:
"Representation and Management of Narrative Information - Theoretical
Principles and Implementation", see
http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/book/978-1-84800-077-3 or, for
an introduction, my paper at the "2009 AAAI Spring Symposium on Intelligent
Complex Event Processing" in Stanford.
Regards,
Gian Piero Zarri
University Paris-Est/Paris12
LiSSi Laboratory
France
Email: za...@noos.fr, gian-piero.za...@univ-paris12.fr
Ansgar Scherp a écrit :
Dear all
It is quite interesting to see this very long thread on events. In the past
time
we have studied many event models (see, e.g., the list Raphael Troncy sent
around).
When studying them, I was very surprised that for many of them no
foundational
literature was studied (philosophy, linguistics, cognitive sciences, etc.).
Rather, the models seem to be developed add hoc and remain in fact quite
simple
for the always argued reason of "being generic".
Libby Miller says, "events are difficult and complex things to model". And
we
would like to stress that fact. Indeed, getting a fully comprehensive
understanding
of what events are is very difficult and challenging. As such, a simple
model
will hardly work. In particular, when interoperability between different
systems
is needed.
Thus, I am happy to announce that at this year's Knowledge Capturing
conference
we will present the Event-Model-F that aims filling the gap of a
comprehensive and
at the same time semantically precise event model [1]. The event model is
available
in OWL and axiomatized using DL (see older TR [2]). What I did for this
event model
is reading literature of foundational sciences and discussing the topic with
philosophers. The Event-Model-F provides comprehensive support to represent
* time and space,
* objects and persons participating in events, and
* mereological, causal, and correlative relationships between events.
In addition, the Event-Model-F provides a flexible means for
* event composition,
* modeling event causality and event correlation, and
* representing different interpretations of the same event.
As sometimes not all of this functionality is needed, the event model is
organized
in patterns. Thus, it is easier to understand to use (just take what you
need
and the leave the rest out).
The event model has its own webpage, where also comprehensive examples are
available, e.g., from the emergency response domain:
http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/eventmodel/
Documentation of the Event-Model-F can be found in [1].
Finally, I would like to draw your attention to a workshop conjunct with
this
year's ACM Multimedia conference that is concerned of events as happenings
in the
real world. This is an effort done together with Ramesh Jain and Mohan
Kankanhalli.
http://www.uni-koblenz.de/confsec/eimm09/
Best
Ansgar
[1] A. Scherp, T. Franz, C. Saathoff and S. Staab, F---A Model of Events
based on
the Foundational Ontology DOLCE+DnS Ultralight, International Conference on
Knowledge Capturing (K-CAP), Redondo Beach, CA, USA, September, 2009.
http://isweb.uni-koblenz.de/eventmodel/event-model-f-kcap.pdf
[2] A. Scherp, T. Franz, C. Saathoff, S. Staab: A Model of Events based on a
Foundational Ontology, Technical Report of the Department of Computer
Science,
02/2009, University of Koblenz-Landau, ISSN (Online) 1864-0850
