=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2969/paper4-ECS
|storemode=property
|title=Towards an Ontology of Procedures
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2969/paper4-ECS.pdf
|volume=Vol-2969
|authors=Cédric Tarbouriech
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/jowo/Tarbouriech21
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==Towards an Ontology of Procedures==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2969/paper4-ECS.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
Towards an Ontology of Procedures
Cédric Tarbouriech1
1
    Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT), Université de Toulouse, France




Abstract
Most of the current ontologies of procedures represent either informational entities (e.g. stan-
dard operating procedures) or processes directed by these informational entities (named here
“executions”). As procedures are informational entities, they are dependent on languages. Even
if two procedures have the same meaning, they can be formulated in different ways. For example,
an apple pie recipe in a cookbook expressed in French and its translation in Esperanto both
have the same meaning. However, they are expressed in two different languages. On the other
hand, two executions may always differ, ever so slightly, even when the same procedure directs
them. They may be realised at different times, by different people, with various tools. Consider
the differences between Alice doing an apple pie on Sunday afternoon with a wooden spoon
and Bob doing another apple pie, following the same recipe as Alice, on Wednesday morning
with a plastic spoon.
    To solve such issues, we may want to introduce an entity independent from all languages and
slight variations called “canonical form”. Our main general objective is to propose an ontology
of canonical forms. Note that the canonical forms must admit several common features with
procedures and executions. Such features encompass a mereological structure (decomposition
of a procedure into sub-procedures and elementary instructions), a temporal structure (the
instructions follow a temporal order) and the specification of participants.
    I have already addressed mereological theories and participants representation. Concerning
the mereology, we would like it to be possible for canonical forms to have the same part multiple
times (e.g. a procedure with repeating instructions). Such a phenomenon is analysed in the
literature on structural universals, in proposals such as Bennett’s slot mereology [1] or Davis’
occurrences [2]. I analysed Bennett’s proposal and showed that this theory is not compatible
with a counting criterion that would enable to count appropriately how many times a whole has
a part [3]. Therefore, I proposed an extension to Bennett’s theory to ensure the applicability of
slot mereology to structural universals, which could be extended to canonical forms. Concerning
the representation of participants, I have exploited the literature about semantic roles (which
define various relations between processes and endurants). I have shown how PSL [4] can be

FOIS 2021 Early Career Symposium (ECS), held at FOIS 2021 - 12th International Conference on Formal Ontology in
Information Systems, September 13-17, 2021, Bolzano, Italy
" cedric.tarbouriech@irit.fr (C. Tarbouriech)
~ https://www.irit.fr/~Cedric.Tarbouriech/ (C. Tarbouriech)
 0000-0001-8119-7826 (C. Tarbouriech)
                                       © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
reinterpreted as an ontology of informational entities (namely procedures) and how it can be
extended with various semantic roles, such as agents and patients [5].
   Even though some features of canonical forms have been identified, their ontological nature
still needs to be investigated. Moreover, the temporal relations within the mereological structure
also require investigation. For example, we need to account how an instruction and the parts
of the next sub-procedure in the temporal order relate to each other. Finally, since canonical
forms typically map to time intervals, the scientific literature on time intervals, such as Allen’s
theory [6], might be relevant.
   The ontology will be written in first-order logic and implemented using OWL. Furthermore,
this theory will be illustrated by multiple types of procedures, such as flight procedures, surgery
procedures or cooking recipes.


Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my PhD supervisors Laure Vieu, Jean-François Éthier and Adrien Barton
for their helpful contributions to this document.


References
[1] K. Bennett, Having a part twice over, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (2013) 83–103.
[2] W. A. Davis, On occurrences of types in types, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (2013)
    349–363.
[3] C. Tarbouriech, A. Barton, L. Vieu, J.-F. Ethier, The Counting Problem of Slot Mereology,
    in: Workshop on Foundational Ontology (FOUST V), Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO
    2021), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, accepted.
[4] M. Grüninger, Using the PSL ontology, in: Handbook on Ontologies, Springer Berlin
    Heidelberg, 2009, pp. 423–443.
[5] C. Tarbouriech, D. Bernard, L. Vieu, A. Barton, J.-F. Ethier, Flight procedures description
    using semantic roles, in: Workshop on Formal Ontologies meet Industry (FOMI), Joint
    Ontology Workshops (JOWO 2021), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, accepted.
[6] J. Allen, Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals, Communications of the ACM 26
    (1983) 832–843.

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