Towards a causal ontology coping with the temporal constraints between causes and effects

The paper describes a causal ontology in which the temporal implications of causation (and, in particular, the temporal constraints it imposes between causes and effects) are coped with in detail. It proposes a classification of causal relations on the basis of the temporal constraints they impose between their causes and effects, and further refines the basic classification for coping also with causation with threshold and with phenomena of production/consumption of stuff. Finally, the paper sketches an application of the causal ontology for developing causal nets used as domain knowledge for natural language interpretation, and briefly addresses also the reasoning techniques required to this purpose.