Families of roles: A new theory of occurrent-dependent roles

Roles are important both theoretically and practically for modelling the world around us. Although many theories of roles have been proposed, there remain aspects which are little understood. In this paper we investigate roles and their contexts from a temporal point of view. We introduce the idea of a family of occurrent-dependent roles as a means to organise prospective and retrospective derived roles around an original role from which they are derived. By this means we account for the existence of groups of similar roles which are difficult to distinguish without a careful analysis of the temporal aspects. Following detailed informal discussion, we present a preliminary formalisation of the key concepts and relations.