Ensembles of Hyperelements: Notion Base for Activity Representation

A method for building context-sensitive models of complex activities is presented. An overall approach for organization of entities - actions, objects, properties, etc. - is developed and a method for their description and for establishing relationships between entity's activity and a context which the entity belongs to is proposed. A main structure, hyperelement , represents an entity. Hyperelements bear active, neutral or extinguished states. The values of hyperelement's components are produced by data units (expressions, procedures, etc.), or by external sources that deliver information from the outside world, or by ensembles . An ensemble is a union of hyperelements; it describes some activity or object. The information from an ensemble is delivered via a resulting function that produces results and properties of a given activity (such as the degree of an aim attaining, the amount of expenditure of a resource, and so on). The method described is intended for usage in developing toolkits for activity automation, in particular, for development of intelligent shells for software packages, office systems, tutorial systems, etc.