| Definitions |
something that happens at a given place and time
An occurrence-type is stative or eventive according to whether it holds of the mereological sum of two of its instances, i.e. if it is cumulative or not. A sitting occurrence is stative since the sum of two sittings is still a sitting occurrence.In general, events differ from situations because they are not assumed to have a description from which they depend. They can be sequenced by some course, but they do not require a description as a unifying criterion.On the other hand, at any time, one can conceive a description that asserts the constraints by which an event of a certian type is such, and in this case, it becomes a situation.Since the decision of designing an explicit description that unifies a perdurant depends on context, task, interest, application, etc., when aligning an ontology do DLP, there can be indecision on where to align an event-oriented class. For example, in the WordNet alignment, we have decided to put only some physical events under 'event', e.g. 'discharge', in order to stress the social orientedness of DLP. But whereas we need to talk explicitly of the criteria by which we conceive discharge events, these will be put under 'situation'.Similar considerations are made for the other types of perdurants in DOLCE.A different notion of event (dealing with change) is currently investigated for further developments: being 'achievement', 'accomplishment', 'state', 'event', etc. can be also considered 'aspects' of processes or of parts of them. For example, the same process 'rock erosion in the Sinni valley' can be conceptualized as an accomplishment (what has brought the current state that e.g. we are trying to explain), as an achievement (the erosion process as the result of a previous accomplishment), as a state (if we collapse the time interval of the erosion into a time point), or as an event (what has changed our focus from a state to another).In the erosion case, we could have good motivations to shift from one aspect to another: a) causation focus, b) effectual focus, c) condensation d) transition (causality).If we want to consider all the aspects of a process together, we need to postulate a unifying descriptive set of criteria (i.e. a 'description'), according to which that process is circumstantiated in a 'situation'. The different aspects will arise as a parts of a same situation.
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