Games and literary theory conference, 2013 : conference review

The Department of English of the University of Malta collaborated with the Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta) to hold the First International Conference on Games and Literary Theory. It ran from the 31st of October to the 1st of November 2013, and was held at the Old University Building, Valletta, Malta. The event proved to be an overwhelmingly smooth and positive experience for all involved. One of the event’s particularly positive aspects was its structure – only one panel at a time with two or three papers each – which admitted fewer papers than is usual for such conferences. In doing so, it gave space for, and indeed generated, a healthy debate after each paper was delivered, allowing both speaker and audience to immerse themselves in the topics at hand.peer-reviewe

An Ontological formalization of the planning task

In this paper we propose a generic task ontology, which formalizes the space of planning problems. Although planning is one of the oldest researched areas in Artificial Intelligence and attempts have been made in the past at developing task ontologies for planning, these formalizations suffer from serious limitations: they do not exhibit the required level of formalization and precision and they usually fail to include some of the key concepts required for specifying planning problems. In con-trast with earlier proposals, our task ontology formalizes the nature of the planning task independently of any planning paradigm, specific domains, or applications and provides a fine-grained, precise and comprehensive characterization of the space of planning problems. Finally, in addition to producing a formal specification we have also operationalized the ontology into a set of executable definitions, which provide a concrete reusable resource for knowledge acquisition and system development in planning applications