On reasoning about events and states

Yesterday, we watched in our local theater, the play "Amadeus". I have seen the movie when it was first launched, and another version of this play in the nineties. Still very impressive, and an opportunity to hear some of Mozart's good music.

Thanks to Paul Vincent's Blog, I clicked the link and got to Paul Haley's posting entitled "time of the next generation of knowledge automation". Paul Haley starts his postings by classifying four types of reasoning:

1. Reasoning at a point within a [business] process
2. Reasoning about events that occur over time.
3. Reasoning about a [business] process (as in deciding what comes next)
4. Reasoning about and across different states (as in planning)

The claim is that the first kind is being supported by business rules (called EDM in the original), the second kind is being supported by event processing, while the third and fourth kinds are not really supported by the state of the art. The third type requires getting the notion of context into reasoning while the fourth type requires getting cross state reasoning (which is different from cross event reasoning). I agree with the classification, and will write more in the future about the third and fourth types in depth. Actually, we also need reasoning that will combine the different types of reasoning as well.