This paper is motivated by the idea of interaction between two directions of research in knowledge representation: the design of action description languages and the development of libraries of reusable, general-purpose knowledge components. Writing an action description that characterizes actions in terms of their effects, as common today, can be compared to writing a program that does not use standard subroutines. We conjecture that a library of standard descriptions for a number of ``basic'' actions can facilitate writing, understanding and modifying action descriptions. To illustrate this idea, we show how the action `PushBox' in the Monkey and Bananas domain can be described as a special case of the ``library action'' `Move'.

PS

In Proceedings of International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), pp. 377-387 2006.

@InProceedings{erdo06, title={Actions as Special Cases}, author={Selim T. Erdoğan and Vladimir Lifschitz}, booktitle={Proceedings of International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR)}, pages={377-387}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?erdo06", year={2006} }