STEEL: A Spatio-Temporal Extended Event Language for Tracking Epidemic Spread from Outbreak Reports
Hervé Chaudet · 2004
We propose a Spatio-Temporal Extended Event Language (STEEL) for representing and reasoning about events that are described in outbreak reports. This language is an extension of the Event Calculus based on mereotopological relationships and structured conglomeration of events, in which time is replaced with spatiotemporal location. It allows representing and building aggregates of events according to the spatiotemporal location of their occurrence. In a proof a concept study, we aimed at comparing the performances of an experimental implementation in Prolog of this language with 3 human experts during a question-answering task on a trial corpus of 35 outbreak reports. This experiment showed experts' agreement with the system's responses.