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Add Act of Refrain to EventOntology per #786#896

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Add Act of Refrain to EventOntology per #786#896
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@PhiBabs935 PhiBabs935 commented Jun 25, 2026

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See #786 and also #843

Act of Refrain =def A Planned Act in which some Agent avoids or stops themselves from participating in some Planned Act.

*Note that the original IRI reservation for this term, cco:ont:00002080, will be updated to cco:ont:00002082 for purposes of deconfliction with PR 862 #862 @APCox

As noted in a scopeNote, this class should not (nor is it intended to be subtyped). That said, when modeling instances of this class, such as an instance wherein an agent refrains from an act of smoking, the question arises of how one is to model the Planned Act the agent has refrained from doing. Below are two tentative strategies:

One strategy is to use the Modal Relations Ontology (mro) to represent the refrained from act as a merely possible instance that is mro:prescribed by some Prescriptive Information Content Entity but not performed:

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So, when I refrain from smoking, the idea is that I am guided by and concretize a prescription that the hypothetical act of smoking must not occur.

This is imperfect, because prohibits is stronger than what is needed (for this case at least). What would be more appropriate is a putative weaker sub-property of prescribes that I will refer to as "[property name]":

[property name] =def x [property name] y at t iff: x is an instance of Process Regulation at time t, and y is an instance of Process at time t, and x prescribes that some y should not occur.

This is not to say that prohibits is never the more appropriate relation. Thus, if I am tempted to steal a loaf of bread, and I refrain from doing so, my refrain concretizes a process prohibition that prohibits bread stealing.

The second strategy is to try to extend the sort of strategy defended here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5370912. [That paper discusses the MRO strategy for modeling unrealized states of affairs and offers arguments for why the paper's alternative approach is to be preferred]. Note that the authors of that paper have not yet reviewed or sanctioned my extension of their approach--any mistakes contained below are entirely my own ;)

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