Hi Dan,
 After reviewing the RKF pages, I think we need to re-do the
"activities" page.  Currently, it doesn't say anything that's not said
elsewhere.  Please replace that page by the content given below.  Thanks!

-Bruce


               Major Activities for Summer 2000

- develop a "partial theory" for time, space, teleology, and modes of
  existence.  A "partial theory" consists of an ontology of terms for 
  classes, instances, and relations, but it excludes the axioms for 
  reasoning about statements expressed with that ontology.  The axioms 
  can be developed, or copied from elsewhere, in the future.  The 
  "partial theory" will enable us to represent components that require
  these terms.

- compile a list of actions, objects, and modifiers that we want to 
  encode in our first release of the component library.  Several sources
  of information contribute to this list:
    - Roget's thesaurus.  See Ken Barker's analysis:
      http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kbarker/roget/actions.html
    - Levine's semantic classes.  (Get a link to this from Ken.)
    - Art Souther's analysis of the chapters 1-6 of the Alberts text
      (Add a link to this).

- develop standard vocabularies for describing:
   - actions.  Our initial vocabulary of "case roles" is based on 
     Ken Barker's dissertation, chapter 3. See:
     http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kbarker/thesis/
   - objects.  Our initial vocabulary of "object <-> object properties"
     is based on Ken Barker's dissertation, chapter 4. See:
     http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kbarker/thesis/

- continue populating our component library.  For this summer, the
  major classes of actions include: Move, Assemble, Make, Change-Possession,
  Eject, Remove, and Convert.

- develop a method for cross-indexing each of our components to the major
  linguistic resources used today: Roget's thesaurus, Wordnet, Framenet,
  Longman's Defining Dictionary, New Oxford Dictionary, and IKB.
  This information is part of our specification for each component.  For
  current examples, see: 
   http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kbarker/working_notes/specs.html

- explore ways that we might benefit from (connect with) the VerbNet
  project, which is just underway at UPenn (see proceedings of AAAI'2000, 
  pages 691-696).

- develop a way of publishing our component library on the internet, 
  primarily to make it available to all team members.  Each component 
  will be thoroughly documented and cross-indexed with the other major
  linguistic resources.  To see our current component library, see:
   (give link to component library)

- extend the KM language with new features required by our work on the
  component library. Peter Clark has the lead on this. (Give link
  Peter and to KM language).

- consult with Peter Clark on question-answering methods and with
  Jerome Thomere on explanation generation.
  (add link to Peter; add this link for Jerome:  
     http://www.ai.sri.com/~thomere)

- consult with Pat Hayes and Mabry Tyson on connecting our components to the 
  CMap interface.
  (add this link for Mabry Tyson:   http://www.ai.sri.com/~tyson
   add this link for Pat Hayes:  http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes/  )

- consult with IET on evaluating the end-to-end systems.
  (add this link for IET    http://www.iet.com/Projects/RKF/   )