[Attempto] ACE Wiki questions: How to represent plans, possible extensions to punctuation and API, and implementing non-OWL rules

[Murray, William R]

Tobias,

I intended this to be a single quick question and then a general one but it snowballed into numerous ACE Wiki questions. I've
ended up with diverse questions on ACE grammar, capabilities for representing plans, time, and space, and possible extensions
for additional punctuation and APIs to signal ACE Wiki events to an application program using it.

Anyway, here goes...

1. I cannot seem to enter a name like A/1-75 Ranger Company since the "/" character is not allowed in names. Could it be added
or would that cause a clash somewhere else? Then I tried 1-75 Rangers, A Company and got caught again as "," isn't allowed in
names. And... Rangers (A/1-75) which also fails. Could one or more of slash, comma, or both parentheses be added?

2. I would like to represent a plan in ACE. Suppose I use a STRIPS-like representation where each operator has preconditions and
postconditions. Now suppose I have a simple three-step plan P, e.g.,

     OP-1 OP-2 OP-3

where each OP-i is an operator that is a plan step in plan P:

    OP-1 is an operator.
    OP-2 is an operator.
    OP-3 is an operator.

and add a new verb "assume" for each precondition...

   OP-1 assumes resource X is available.
   OP-2 assumes resource Y is available.
   OP-3 assumes resource Z is available.

and then add a rule like this

   If a plan step O assumes a resource J is available and resource J is not available
   then plan step O fails.

and overall rules so that any step of the plan failing causes the whole plan
to fail...

  If a plan K has a plan step that fails then plan K fails.
  If there is no plan step of K that fails then plan K succeeds.

I don't know if this is the right approach and would like other suggestions.

The first problem I run into is trying to represent the availability of resources:

   Resource X is available for OP-1.

The best I could come up with are these two statements (rules):
 [cid:image001.png at 01CA50D5.63877BC0]
where X would be a plan step and Y the overall plan and Z some resource required for plan step X.

Do you have any better suggestions? If I stay with this will SWRL rules be produced when I export
the code or do I have to handcode them?

3. How do I make statements that describe things? E.g., "Ranger Company A is available."
It would seem that "available" is a non-transitive adjective and I don't see how to enter that as a new word.
It seems only adjectives between nouns can be entered so I ended up with "available for" above.

But sometimes it would seem you'd simply need to save <noun> is <adjective>, e.g., "the
terrain is rough" or "the input is even". How do you do that in ACE Wiki?

4. Similarly, how do I enter standalone (intransitive) verbs? E.g., "OP-1 fails" and "Plan P fails."

5. I'm wondering how to use ACE grammar to represent events in time and space:

Does ACE allow describing the location and time of events, and what is the best way to
do this? I'd like to be able to have two statements such as "Ranger Company A is at Kandahar
at time T" and "Ranger Company A is at Melbourne at time T" and conclude there is a contradiction.

But I fear these kind of statements would not be in the ACE grammar and in general I'd need a constraint checker
to see if two locations are too far apart for the unit to move between in the time specified. Something
like a tie-in to CHR would be nice.

6. Is there a way I can tie into the ACE Wiki API so that when a contradiction is signaled I can run
some code of my own? It seems wherever you decide to display contradictions in red you could also
dispatch to user code via an ACE Wiki hook and that would be very useful. In my case I'd record
the contradiction, attempt to have it resolved in dialog with the user, and then try to withdraw the
contradictory statement or add a new plan.

Thanks for all the help. I know it's a lot of questions but at least we've moved on from installation! :)

--Thanks,
           Bill


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