A behaviouristic approach to representing processes and procedures in the OASIS 2 ontology

TL;DR

This paper extends the OASIS 2 ontology to effectively represent processes, procedures, and agent behaviors, addressing a gap in foundational ontologies for practical semantic applications.

Contribution

It introduces an extension to the OASIS 2 ontology that integrates process and procedure modeling with agent behavior representation.

Findings

Enhanced ontology supports detailed process and procedure modeling.

Balances generality and applicability in agent behavior representation.

Facilitates practical semantic applications involving agents and processes.

Abstract

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.