Thematic roles

Roles in conceptual and linguistic modeling

Thematic roles classify how participants relate to an event or state: agent, patient, instrument, beneficiary, source, goal, and many refinements. They connect linguistic analysis (who does what to whom) to ontology design when modelling actions, processes, and business processes.

Semantic-web encodings of events and frames appear in [AlHe2020]; ontological analysis of processes in [GuGu2024].

Roles can be reified as dedicated OPs or as qualifiers on event individuals; either way they should stay consistent with object property definitions and with troponomy when verbs are central.

The rule engine evaluates symbolic IF/THEN rules—not full NLP—but role-consistent predicate names make rules auditable and align documentation with TAoKE’s linguistic layer.