Non-representable entities

  The ontological commitments I have made in this research are intended to allow a majority of concepts encountered in the reading of short science fiction stories to be represented. There is a class of entities which is difficult to precisely represent in the current   ontology. To illustrate, consider a thunderstorm. To what ontological category should it belong? It seems correct to place it within the physical domain of the ontological grid; the difficult question is which which type to place it within. It is quite obviously not a state, but beyond that it is less clear where it should be placed in my ontology. It contains certain aspects of agency, yet it is not truly volitional. Similarly, it appears to contain aspects of action, yet this is not a completely satisfying determination either.

Actually, there is a class of entities in the world which are somewhat like actions and somewhat like agents. Thunderstorms, gravity, and other ``natural'' phenomenon are examples of this. I have not included a type for this sort of entity; when I have needed representation for similar concepts, I have either had them placed in the agent or the action type of the ontological grid. Other researchers do focus on a need for the explicit representation of these entities (see the work of [#!creat:chi1!#], for example); I have been driven by the functional requirements of my specific stories. I do not foresee difficulty, however, in extending the   ontology to include another type; it has merely not been required by the domain of my research nor by the genre of my texts.