A behaviouristic approach to representing processes and procedures in the OASIS 2 ontology
This work addresses the problem of precise instruction representation in semantic systems for domains requiring agent planning, though it appears incremental as an extension of an existing ontology.
The paper tackles the lack of foundational ontologies for representing processes and procedures, which limits semantic approaches in real-world scenarios, by extending the OASIS 2 ontology to combine agent behavior representation with full conceptualization of processes and procedures.
Foundational ontologies devoted to the effective representation of processes and procedures are not widely investigated at present, thereby limiting the practical adoption of semantic approaches in real scenarios where the precise instructions to follow must be considered. Also, the representation ought to include how agents should carry out the actions associated with the process, whether or not agents are able to perform those actions, the possible roles played as well as the related events. The OASIS ontology provides an established model to capture agents and their interactions but lacks means for representing processes and procedures carried out by agents. This motivates the research presented in this article, which delivers an extension of the OASIS 2 ontology to combine the capabilities for representing agents and their behaviours with the full conceptualization of processes and procedures. The overarching goal is to deliver a foundational OWL ontology that deals with agent planning, reaching a balance between generality and applicability, which is known to be an open challenge.