A structured and in–depth representation of the semantic content of elementary and complex events. (1st January 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Zarri, Gian Piero
• Is Part Of: International journal of metadata, semantics and ontologies. Volume 10:Number 1(2015)
• Page Start: 12
• Page End: 27
• Publication Date: 2015-01-01
• Subjects: complex events -- Davidsonian approach -- neo–Davidsonian approach -- ontology of concepts -- ontology of events -- querying -- inference -- semantic content -- elementary events -- narrative information -- NKRL -- Narrative Knowledge Representation Language -- narratives -- temporal information; Metadata -- Periodicals; Semantic Web -- Periodicals; Ontologies (Information retrieval) -- Periodicals; Data structures (Computer science) -- Periodicals; Information theory -- Periodicals; 005.74
• DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2015.068262
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1744-2621

Abstract

'Events' are understood here, following the standard philosophical acceptation and in agreement with a Davidsonian and neo–Davidsonian approach, as the explicit, 'narrative' accounts of (spatio–temporal constrained) behaviours, states, actions and mutual interactions that concern animate/inanimate, human/non–human, abstract/concrete etc. well–identified 'entities'. Within this 'explicit' and 'symbolic' framework, we describe then how to isolate and represent in a computer–suitable form 'elementary events' inside a stream of narrative information, how to connect together these elementary events to give rise to 'complex events' through, e.g., 'causal' or 'conditional' relationships and how to make use of these formal structures for querying and inference operations. In this context, we will make use of NKRL (the Narrative Knowledge Representation Language), a language/environment expressly specified and implemented for dealing with narratives and temporal information, as formal support for our line of reasoning.