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Processes are 
:
- A system of operations in the production of something.
- A series of actions, changes, or functions that bring about an end or
result.
- Course or passage of time.
- Ongoing movement; progression.
So processes have two general forms: one in which something is
happening and another in which something is completed. The
conventional terminology is that the latter are culminated
processes. We will also term any non-culminated process active
to clearly distinguish this case. It is therefore convenient to
graphically present processes as nodes in which some ``action,
change, or function'' takes place, and arcs which link one process
(node) to another that temporally follows either by virtue of
culmination of the first or other circumstances. A process can be
recursively defined as a network (or graph) of process nodes (possibly
disconnected, i.e. parallel). Thus, a hierarchy of processes can exist,
grounding out at single process nodes for the simplest types of
processes.
An action is just a
particular kind of process which involves a volitional agent acting in
the world. We call our representations of actions Parameterized
Action Representations (PARs) and they contain a necessary slot for an
agent. A generic process representation is a PAR with an optional agent
slot. In this report, we deal almost exclusively with PARs that contain
the necessary agent slot.
Our representation is a modified version of the representation used by
Kalita and Lee [KL96], expanded to include culmination
conditions, agent/object representations, as well as more detail about
the specifics of actions.
DTOG Group