A Property-based Approach for Characterizing Goals

Goals are an essential attitude of proactive agents described with mentalistic attitudes. Nonetheless, in the literature no well agreed-upon definition of the term goal has arisen so far. In this paper it is argued that a property-based view on goals can help understanding the nature of the goal concept. Therefore, the goal concept is discussed with respect to typ-ical properties, which are associated with the representation and processing of goals. It is discussed, how the well-known PRS architecture and recent extensions deal with these char-acteristics. As a result, we argue that supporting also long-term goals, which may not (immediately or at all) lead to actions, would enrich the possibilities of the agent developer as also more strategic behavior is expressible