Advanced Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Making Use of an Advanced N-ary Model

Abstract

We discuss in this paper some aspects of NKRL, the Narrative Knowledge Representation Language. This is a high-level n-ary conceptual tool specially conceived for the representation and management of real world, dynamically characterized entities like situations, events and complex events, actions (e.g., in a robotics context) scripts/scenarios/narratives etc. After having pointed out some shortcomings of the standard ontological solutions for dealing with this sort of information, and having recalled some general characteristics of NKRL (like the addition of an "ontology of events" to the usual "ontology of objects"), we focus on the rules/inferential aspects proper to this language. We introduce, then, the general, formal model of "rule" used in an NKRL context and we show how this can be appropriately adapted to the setup of advanced types of inference operations based, e.g., on "analogical" and "causal" reasoning.