Actions as special cases

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the idea of interaction between two directions of research in knowledge representation: the design of description languages and the development of libraries of reusable, general-purpose knowledge components. Writing an description that characterizes actions in terms of their effects, as common today, can be compared to writing a program that does not use standard subroutines. We conjecture that a of standard descriptions for a number of basic actions can facilitate writing, understanding and modifying descriptions. In this paper, we take some steps towards determining how such a library, written in the language C+, can be used. When using an instance of a description, we relate the constants to the domain-specific constants by providing definitions. Therefore, a theory of explicit definitions in C+ is developed. To illustrate the use of the library, we show how the PushBox in the Monkey and Bananas domain can be described as a special case of the library action Move.