Going Places — Notes on a Modular Development of Knowledge about Travel

Formalizing and Compiling Background Knowledge and Its Applications to Knowledge Representation and Question Answering

Volume

Papers from the 2006 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

The paper presents a formalization of a comparatively simple traveling story. The emphasis is on the development and implementation of a library of knowledge modules needed for axiomatization of journey - a movement of a group of objects from one place (the origin) to another (the destination). The movement should be able to follow a predefined route, and to achieve its goal even in the presence of natural interruptions, e.g. unexpected stops. We outline a language M for defining knowledge modules and for assembling them into a coherent knowledge base in CR-Prolog - an extension of Answer Set Prolog capable of encoding rare events. The formalization generalizes theory of action by introducing a notion of activity - a sequence of intended actions which can be interrupted by unexpected and unplanned events. The notion of journey presented in the paper is a special case of a more general notion of activity.