Towards a general theory of action and time (Q1060013)

The author proposes as a general framework a many-sorted predicate calculus with time-intervals, properties and objects as basic sorts with sorts for locations, occurrences, events and processes as subsorts of occurrences, agents, actions, plans,... added later on. The language contains predicate symbols intended to stand for the intuitive relations ''property p holds at time t'', ''event e occurs at time t'', ''process e is occurring at time t'' and many more as well as function symbols taking e.g. two events into a composite event or taking an object o and two locations \(L_ 1\), \(L_ 2\) into the event of changing the position of o from \(L_ 1\) to \(L_ 2\). The main part of the paper consists of the discussion of possible postulates among these primitives in the areas of natural language processing and of planning.