Publication Details

A Portable Process Language

by Clark, Peter E. and Morley, David and Chaudhri, Vinay K. and Myers, Karen L

in Workshop on the Role of Ontologies in Planning and Scheduling

Address: Monterey, CA
June 7 2005.

Process representation languages designed to support execution have evolved to support specialized reasoning capabilities like action selection and task decomposition, but do not readily support inferences that one might need for explanation or question answering. In this paper, we report on a process language, PPL, that we have designed to serve as a bridge between a representation designed for execution and a representation designed for applications such as question answering and explanation generation. Through its use of a propositional-style representation of process structure, PPL can enable the use of generalized reasoning methods for those purposes. PPL is novel in that it directly encodes the process "flow chart" in a neutral, KIF-like syntax, allowing other modules to introspect on the process structure.