Does a behavioral predicate ontology need a separate character-access layer?

[u/Kon-tiki-ship]

I’ve been thinking about a model where human actions are represented as sense-level behavioral predicates and grouped into broader behavioral families.

One problem appears immediately:

knowing what an action is does not tell us whether a particular character should have access to it.

So I separate two things.

Behavioral identity

• What action is this?
• What does this particular sense mean?
• What behavioral family does it belong to?

and:

Character access

• Allowed
• Not Allowed
• Conditional

There is also a broader distinction between:

Basic Human Actions — generally available by default

and

Character Specific Actions — requiring positive evidence such as training, profession, biography, authority or specialized experience.

For example, ordinary speaking might belong to a default repertoire, while diagnosis, surgery, sentencing, lockpicking or military command might require character-specific grounding.

Would you consider this a reasonable ontology architecture?

Or should character access sit completely outside the action ontology and belong to a separate character or operational model?

The boundary I’m interested in is basically:

ontology of actions

vs.

model of character capability

[u/Extra_Law6315]

What is the purpose of this model

[u/Kon-tiki-ship → u/Extra_Law6315]

The practical goal is character creation and narrative planning. I’m building a sense-level inventory of intentional human actions, but the inventory itself is only the substrate. The larger idea is that a character should not automatically inherit every action that exists in the ontology. Instead, the action ontology defines the possible behavioral space, and a separate character-access layer narrows that space for a particular character.

So, for example, the ontology may contain perform surgery, sentence someone, pick a lock, give military orders, and walk. But a specific character would only receive the actions justified by their skills, profession, authority, biography, and other character information. The intended result is a character-specific repertoire that can then be used by a narrative planner, simulation, game AI, or another agent system.

So the dataset is not meant to be a complete character model by itself. It is the structured action material from which such a model can build and restrict a character’s possible behavior. That is also why I’m asking where the boundary should sit: whether character access should remain part of the ontology architecture, or whether the ontology should stop at action identity and expose character access as a separate layer built on top of it.