A Situation Theoretic Approach to the Representation of Processes
Christopher Menzel, Richard J. Mayer · 1996
Typical methods for representing business, engineering, and manufacturing processes represent process information by means of rather restricted, often graphical languages. These languages are often fine as far as they go, but for many purposes—information sharing, in particular—much more precise, detailed representations of enterprise processes are required. In this paper we develop an approach to the rigorous representation of process information based on situation theory . We begin with an informal account of the semantic categories of the approach including situations, infons, types, activities, and processes, as well as the central relations that can hold between them. A framework known as ST that builds upon the Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) is introduced for expressing information in these terms. The use of ST is then illustrated in detail by means of a series of examples.