A proposal for an event-based representational formalism

We outline a formalism for structural, or symbolic, representation, the necessity of which has been acutely felt not just in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition, but also in the natural sciences, particularly biology. At the same time, biology has been gradually edging to the forefront of sciences, although the reasons obviously have nothing to do with its state of formalization or maturity. Rather, the reasons have to do with the growing realization that the objects of biology are not only more important (to society) and interesting (to science), but that they also more explicitly exhibit the evolving nature of all objects in the Universe. It is this view of objects as evolving structural entities/processes that we aim to formally address here, in contrast to the ubiquitous mathematical view of objects as points in some abstract space. In light of the above, the paper is addressed to a very broad group of scientists. One can gain an initial intuitive understanding of the proposed representation by generalizing the temporal process of the (Peano) construction of natural numbers: replace the single structureless unit out of which a number is built by multiple structural ones. An immediate and important consequence of the distinguishability (or multiplicity) of units in the construction process is that we can now see which unit was attached and when. Hence, the resulting (object) representation for the first time embodies temporal structural information in the form of a formative, or generative, object “history”