A Procedural Logic

Much of our commonsense knowledge about the real world is concerned with the way things are done. This knowledge is often in the form of procedures or sequences of actions for achieving particular goals. In this paper, a formalism is presented for representing such knowledge based on the notion of process. A declarative semantics for the representation is given, which allows a user to state facts about the effects of doing things in the problem domain of interest. An operational semantics is also provided, which shows how this knowledge can be used to achieve given goals or to form intentions regarding their achievement. The formalism also serves as an executable program specification language suitable for constructing complex systems.

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