Defining Activity Specifications in OWL

As the amount of information on the web increases, so does the importance of ontologies available to capture it. This work is concerned with supporting a correct and meaningful representation of activities on the Semantic Web, with the potential to support tasks such as activity recognition and reasoning about causation. This requires an ontology capable of more than simply documenting and annotating individual activity occurrences; definitions of activity specifications are needed. Current representations of activities in OWL do not meet the basic requirements for activity specifications. Detailed definitions of an activity’s preconditions and effects are lacking, in particular with respect to a consideration of change over time. This paper leverages existing work to fill this void with an ontology design pattern for activity specifications in OWL.