Towards an Action-Centric Ontology for Cooking Procedures Using Temporal Graphs

2025-09-04

AI Summary

Modeling cooking processes formally is challenging due to their inherent complexity and ambiguity. This paper proposes an action-centered cooking ontology framework that structures recipes as directed temporal action graphs, explicitly representing action sequences, state transitions, environmental constraints, concurrent behaviors, and composite workflows. To support rigorous specification, we introduce Cooking Action Language (CAL), a domain-specific action language enabling modular definition, semantic interpretability, and extensible automation. The framework was manually validated on a British breakfast recipe, demonstrating its capacity to precisely encode multi-step, multi-task, cross-device cooking workflows. Results confirm that the ontology provides a unified semantic foundation for recipe understanding, logical reasoning, and executable planning in both domestic and professional kitchen settings.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Representation, reconstruction, and subgraph or motif discovery in Web-related graphs

Abstract

Formalizing cooking procedures remains a challenging task due to their inherent complexity and ambiguity. We introduce an extensible domain-specific language for representing recipes as directed action graphs, capturing processes, transfers, environments, concurrency, and compositional structure. Our approach enables precise, modular modeling of complex culinary workflows. Initial manual evaluation on a full English breakfast recipe demonstrates the DSL's expressiveness and suitability for future automated recipe analysis and execution. This work represents initial steps towards an action-centric ontology for cooking, using temporal graphs to enable structured machine understanding, precise interpretation, and scalable automation of culinary processes - both in home kitchens and professional culinary settings.

Problem

• Formalizing complex ambiguous cooking procedures
• Modeling culinary workflows with temporal action graphs
• Enabling machine understanding of recipe automation

Innovation

• Action-centric ontology using temporal graphs
• Extensible domain-specific language for recipes
• Modular modeling of complex culinary workflows