CHI '91 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Artificial intelligence: a modern approach
Artificial intelligence: a modern approach
Observations, measurements and semantic reference spaces
Applied Ontology - Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modelling
Artefacts and Roles: Modelling Strategies in a Multiplicative Ontology
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Affordance-based similarity measurement for entity types
COSIT'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Spatial information theory
An image-schematic account of spatial categories
COSIT'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Spatial information theory
Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Towards affordance-based robot control
Proceedings of the 2006 international conference on Towards affordance-based robot control
Grounding geographic categories in the meaningful environment
COSIT'09 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Spatial information theory
Constructing Bodies and their Qualities from Observations
Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference (FOIS 2010)
An ontology design pattern for referential qualities
ISWC'11 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on The semantic web - Volume Part I
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Affordances elude ontology. They have been recognized to play a role in categorization, especially of artifacts, but also of natural features. Yet, attempts to ontologize them face problems ranging from their presumed subjective nature to the fact that they involve potential actions, not objects or properties. We take a fresh look at the ontology of affordances, based on a simple insight: affordances are perceived by agents and may lead to actions, just like qualities are perceived and may lead to observations. We understand perception as a process invoking a quale in an agent. This quale can then be expressed as an action, if it stems from an affordance, or as an observation, if it stems from an other quality. Thus, we see affordances as qualities of the environment, perceived and potentially expressed by agents. We extend our recently proposed ontology of observations to include affordances and show how the parallel between observations (producing values) and affordances (producing actions) provides a simple and powerful ontological account of both.