Relations among Roles

In this paper we discuss the possible types of relationships between participant roles in related situation types. We first discuss principles that might determine which roles are present in one type of situation, given the roles present in a related type of situation. While no simple general rules seem to exist, there are useful rules for particular cases. In addition, we discuss how relationships between roles themselves parallel relations between other elements in ontologies. Apart from the subrole relation, we consider relations analogous to meronymy and antonymy, which are rare in the domain of roles, and a complementarity relation between roles, which is fairly common.