Thank you all for feedback and thoughts.

I find the comments on linguistics and speech acts interesting – I think it’s the right thread to pull on to find an answer to my original query. I don’t think the discussion has yielded a clear position of “commands” within ontology yet, so here are a few more thought-provoking questions.

Using William Frank’s example, the proposition: “cat in a box” can easily be represented in an ontology. Representing: “Tom: put the cat in the box” (call this command A) in an ontology involves that proposition coupled with a command “put”, a directing agent (me?), and a directed agent (Tom). I agree that A is a speech act (imperative, performative), but what is it in an ontology? Are we saying that

- “speech act” is an object in an ontology, and

- that “command” is a kind of “speech act”, and

- the compound proposition A is an instance of “command”?

If that command is issued by one software agent to another (e.g., in a SOA-based workflow), is it still a “speech act”?