Ok,
use SocialEntity. One must distinguish the kind vs. the
role, I think. E.g., the event participant roles in the
sentence “John gave Mary a gun” is roughly: agent(john, E1),
affectedEntity/patient(mary, E1), theme(gun, E1), but the
kinds of the objects at the class level:
agent(Agent,
Event), affectedEntity(Agent, Event), theme(PhysicalEntity,
Event).
There
is both a role property/relation called agent or perhaps
better, agentOf, to distinguish it from the kind/type called
Agent.
“agentOf”
is a property/relation, i.e., a role. “Agent” is a class,
i.e., the class of volitional entities.
Social
roles do get complex very quickly. I direct you to the
following, among others:
Masolo,
Claudio; Laure Vieu; Emanuele Bottazzi; Carola Catenacci;
Roberta Ferrario; Aldo Gangemi; Nicola Guarino. 2004. Social
Roles and their Descriptions,
Proceedings
of the Ninth International Conference on the Principles of
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. AAAI Press, 2004.
http://www.loa-cnr.it/Papers/KR04MasoloC.pdf.
Masolo,
Claudio, Giancarlo Guizzardi, Laure Vieu, Emanuele Bottazzi,
and Roberta Ferrario. Relational roles and qua-individuals.
In Guido Boella, James Odell, Leendert van der Torre, and
Harko Verhagen, editors, Roles, an Interdisciplinary
Perspective: Ontologies, Programming Languages, and
Multiagent Systems. Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium,
pages 103–112. AAAI Press, 2005.
http://www.irit.fr/publis/LILAC/MGVBF-rolesAAAI05.pdf.
Arp,
R. & Smith, B. (2008). Function, role, and disposition
in basic formal ontology. In Proceedings of Bio-Ontologies
Workshop (ISMB 2008) (pp. 45–48). Available from Nature
Proceedings at:
http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1941.1.
Vieu,
Laure, Stefano Borgo, and Claudio Masolo. 2008. Artefacts
and Roles: Modelling Strategies in a Multiplicative
Ontology. Formal Ontology in Information Systems, C.
Eschenbach and M. Grüninger (Eds.) IOS Press, 2008.
Thanks,
Leo