General Purpose Database of Knowledge about Actions

这个项目的目标是建立一个通用的数据库，其中包含以因果计算器(CCalc)语言表示的行动的常识事实。CCalc是一个用于自动推理行动和计划生成的系统。它的语言被用来形式化许多小的动作领域，如积木世界和传教士与食人族的谜题，也有几个中等大小的领域，如桑德沃尔的动物园世界。建立关于行动的通用知识数据库将是朝着解决知识表示的共性问题迈出的一步。该项目将在过去努力的基础上，分离这些领域和类似个别领域的共同概念和原则，并建立一个以一般形式陈述的这些原则的数据库。建立这样一个数据库，将有可能通过添加特定领域的事实，获得许多单独行动领域的形式化，包括过去研究过的行动领域。该数据库将包括关于各种行动的直接和间接影响、关于行动的可执行性以及关于执行行动的代理人的一般假设。其中一些事实与物体以及它们的位置和内部状态的变化有关。例如，一个有用的假设是，通常情况下，只有当代理位于对象旁边时，代理才能执行影响对象的位置或状态的操作。另一种说法是，一个物体通常由某种东西支撑--由某种水平表面支撑，或者由这种表面支撑的其他物体支撑--而移动物体间接地影响该物体支撑的物体的位置。该数据库还将包含有关创建和销毁对象、关于动物和人类、关于买卖、关于与知识和记忆相关的行为等常识性事实。

The objective of this project is to build a general purpose database of commonsense facts about actions expressed in the language of the Causal Calculator (CCalc). CCalc is a system for automated reasoning about actions and for plan generation. Its language has been used to formalize many small action domains, such as the blocks world and the Missionaries and Cannibals puzzle, and also several medium-size domains, such as Sandewall's Zoo World. Building a general purpose database of knowledge about actions will be a step towards solving the problem of generality in knowledge representation.Building on past efforts, this project will isolate the concepts and principles that these and similar individual domains have in common, and build a database of such principles stated in a general form. The creation of such a data base will make it possible to obtain formalizations of many individual action domains, including those studied in the past, by adding domain-specific facts. The database will include general assumptions about the effects, both direct and indirect, of actions of various kinds, about the executability of actions, and about agents that execute them. Some of these facts have to do with objects and change in their locations and internal states. For instance, one useful assumption is that normally an agent can execute an action affecting the location or state of an object only if the agent is located next to the object. Another is that an object is typically supported by something--by horizontal surfaces of some kind, or by other objects supported by such a surface--and that moving the object indirectly affects the locations of the things that are supported by that object. The database will also contain commonsense facts about creating and destroying objects, about animals and humans, about buying and selling, about actions related to knowledge and memory, etc.