Affiliations: [a] Research Center of Service Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan. E-mail: mizo@jaist.ac.jp | [b] College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK. E-mail: apgalton@ex.ac.uk | [c] College of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. E-mail: y-kita@fc.ritsumei.ac.jp | [d] Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan. E-mail: kozaki@ei.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding address: Riichiro Mizoguchi, Research Center of Service Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, 1-1 Asahidai, Nomi, Ishikawa 923-1292, Japan. E-mail: mizo@jaist.ac.jp.
Note: [] Accepted by: Yuval Shahar
Abstract: Roles are important both theoretically and practically for modelling the world around us. Although many theories of roles have been proposed, there remain aspects which are little understood. In this paper we investigate roles and their contexts from a temporal point of view. We introduce the idea of a family of occurrent-dependent roles as a means to organise prospective and retrospective derived roles around an original role from which they are derived. By this means we account for the existence of groups of similar roles which are difficult to distinguish without a careful analysis of the temporal aspects. Following detailed informal discussion, we present a preliminary formalisation of the key concepts and relations.
Keywords: Theory of roles, classification of roles, derived role
