From: Jerry Hobbs ([email protected])
Date: 03/14/02
Drew, Good point about the importance of noncontiguous eventualities. What time-span-of would mean in a branching futures model of time is an interesting question, which I hope would not lead to excessive complication. By the way, everyone, I had [email protected] in my original mailing where I should have had [email protected]. The present mailing list is correct. -- Jerry Drew McDermott wrote: > > Jerry -- The temporal ontology is nicely done. I am a bit confused > over "eventualities," however: > > 2.4. Linking Time and Events: > > ... > The term "eventuality" will be used to cover events, states, > processes, propositions, states of affairs, and anything else that can > be located with respect to time. The possible natures of > eventualities would be spelled out in the event ontologies. > > ... > The predicate time-span-of relates eventualities to instants or > intervals. For contiguous states and processes, it tells the entire > instant or interval for which the state or process obtains or takes > place. > > time-span-of(T,e) --> temporal-entity(T) & eventuality(e) > time-span-of(T,e) & interval(T) --> during(e,T) > time-span-of(t,e) & instant(t) --> at-time(e,t) > time-span-of(T,e) & interval(T) & ~inside(t1,T) > & ~start-of(t1,T) & ~end-of(t1,T) > --> ~at-time(e,t1) > time-span-of(t,e) & instant(t) & t1 =/= t --> ~at-time(e,t1) > > time-span-of is a predicate rather than a function because until the > time ontology is extended to aggregates of temporal entities, the > function would not be defined for noncontiguous eventualities. > > You should clarify that most eventualities *are* noncontiguous. I'm > thinking of eventualities such as weather(Afghanistan, cloudy). The > only contiguous ones are particularly historical events such as > GulfWar. (Even those become noncontiguous if you allow some time > points to be in hypothetical universes, which may sound esoteric, but > would be useful in talking about alternative operational plans.) > > -- Drew
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