Heh - Haven't heard that mentioned in a while;. I always had the impression that KQML sort-of fizzled out; I don't think anyone was working with it when I was at EIT 94-95.  

I am notifying the subscribers of this list  of a few  sources that might be useful to them (there are several different topics that have come up on this thread by typing << 

The foundational work on speech acts is John Austin's "How to do things with words."  (Austin 1962).  John Searle aso wrote on the subject. 

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An important work  on actions and events  is Davidson's "Essays on Action and Events".  (Davidson 1980).   Good commentaries  can be found in LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B. P. , eds.  (1988).   

The Davidsonian approach treats events as first class entities. We can represent the meaning of "Sebastian walked in Bologna at midnight"  as a series of statements:

   There is a Walking, Walk1.  

   A walker in  Walk1 is Sebastian. 

   A location of Walk1 is Bologna.

   A time of Walk1 is midnight. 

An advantage of using this approach as compared to using predicates with an argument for each adverbial modifier of the walk is that the number of  such modifiers, (and hence the number of predicates of different arity) can be unbounded, and it is not clear how to generate the necessary entailments - for example, that someone walked in Bologna at midnight; that Sebastian walked in Bologna, etc. 

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Wordnet - http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ -  contains a hierarchy of verbs; however Wordnet is not not an ontology, and there are known issues in the hierarchy (see e.g. Richens 2008). 

Cyc uses a Davidsonian model of events;  

Some  high level concepts included in opencyc are documented under "Doing" - http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/doing-vocab.html . 

Some more specific  types of events include "Transformation"  - http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/transform-vocab.html and "Movement" - http://www.cyc.com/cycdoc/vocab/movement-vocab.html

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Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words : the William James lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. Clarendon Press ;, Oxford.

LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B. P. eds. (1988). Action and events : perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. B. Blackwell,, Oxford, UK ;New York, NY, USA.

Richens, T. (2008). Anomalies in the wordnet verb hierarchy. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics-Volume 1, pages 729–736. Association for Computational Linguistics. Available at: http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1092.pdf

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