© Roger M Tagg 2008, 2010
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web". This website is in process of continuous development.
Activities are regarded in Frolio as a major sub-type of Abstract Concept. A number of types of relationships involve Activities.
Activities can be built up in structures by combining more basic activities or basic actions.
Although many languages use a large number of verbs, others - like Persian - have a smaller number of basic verbs, but lots of compounds on top of them. like kardan - to do or make, and khordan - to eat or take in, on top of which a number of compounds are made, like fekr mikonam (I think) - and khahesh mikonam (I request). mikonam is the 1st person present tense of kardan.
In many cases where people use verbs in languages, they are really expressing a relationship. The two best examples are "is" and "has" (both of which are not verbs in Arabic, for example). Others are "wish", "can", "may", "aim to" - most of these are auxiliary verbs, even in English.
As happens in Persian, "do" simply says that a certain type of action is performed (now, or as part of a pattern). "Perform" or "carry out" are more or less synonymous.
Following (approximately) the Farsi approach, we can classify many actions into a relatively small number of general types as follows.
Name of Basic Action Type |
English "verbs" based on this type |
|---|---|
Construct, or Make |
Prepare, Cook, Mould, Draw, Manufacture, Assemble |
Send out |
Excrete, Send, Give, Kick, Throw, Emit, Pay |
Take in |
Take, Receive, Eat, Drink, Read, Remember |
Move |
Move (oneself or something else), Pull, Push, Walk, Carry, Lift, Drop, Travel, Raise, Lower |
Change |
Damage, Transform, Improve, Re-orientate, Digest, Become, Grow, Stretch, Inflate, Shrink, Kill, Rearrange |
Articulate |
Write, Speak, Signal, Ask, Cry, State |
Hit |
Strike, Cut |
Summarize |
Calculate, Generalize |
Divide |
Cut, Distinguish, Compare, Itemize, Include, Exclude |
Hold |
Grasp, Confine, Support, Contain |
Reflect |
Think, Dream, Feel |
Find |
Search, Discover, Access |
Use |
Use, Employ, Leverage (ugh!!), Take advantage of (too long) |
Resolve |
Decide, Agree |
Cause to
Happen
|
Arrange, Implement, Control, Monitor, Direct, Launch, Bring about, Provide |
Most activities that we can observe are compound or structured; we can talk about an Activity being composed of several Actions - or of several smaller Activities, or some combination. The simplest structure is to repeat the same action one time after another. What the actor is acting upon will usually change. If we chew some food, it will be reduced to smaller pieces, and our saliva may set off chemical changes. Eventually some condition arises when we stop repeating the action.
The next structure is to perform a series of smaller activities one after the other, each one waiting for the previous one to complete. This can be thought of as similar to the Agenda of a Meeting, or of stages in following a set of cooking instructions. We could also include here "causation", where one activity triggers another.
Then we could have a choice, such that if a condition is true, we do A - otherwise we do B. This condition would usually be tested when we have to make the difference. However an external event may also occur (e.g. a customer cancels an order, or the end of the accounting period comes up) that forces us to review the activities in mid-stream.
Contrasting with the above, the actions or smaller activities could be done in parallel, possibly by different people, but possibly by one person, e.g. a car driver, pianist or organist.
In all the above situations, we are assuming that there is always a human or machine available to start the work. To cover this, we need to keep track of who is ready to do the activities, and whether all the resources they need are available (e.g. a spade to dig a hole, transport to make a journey, a workbench on which to do the repair).
In practical situations, these structures are too simplistic. A cook may start chopping vegetables, but interrupt this to turn the heat under a saucepan up or down. If many people are involved, or there are tools needed, then the timing of actions can get complicated. Some actions can be continuous, e.g. holding; others can be repetitive, e.g. whisking cream; others can be intermittent, e.g. stirring the pot; and others can be almost instantaneous, like breaking an egg.
Most of the verbs expressing activity have a subject and an object, and often have a tool and a "beneficiary". These can easily correspond to the roles in certain categories of relationship, particularly Transformation and Arrangement.
These link you, the reader, to more details about FROLIO. The core of this website is a set of pages about relationships - links to these are on the first table below. The index in the bottom row points to a set of "diatribes" or opinionated essays, about things the author feels particularly strongly about!
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 29th January 2010
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .