situationthat

Situationthat is a term used to describe a formal representation of a specific circumstance in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. It denotes a structured description of a situation that includes context, participants, resources, constraints, and goals, with the aim of enabling systematic reasoning about actions and outcomes.

The term arose as a neologism in academic discussions of situational reasoning in the early 2020s. It emphasizes that the description concerns “a situation that” requires analysis, rather than a generic or abstract notion of a situation. As a coined term, it is primarily used in theoretical or methodological contexts rather than as a widely adopted standard.

A typical situationthat encompasses several core components: context (environmental conditions, time and place), entities (agents, objects, organizations), relations (interactions, dependencies, causality), attributes (states, capabilities, preferences), and constraints (rules, budgets, safety requirements). It also often includes goals or desired outcomes and may model temporal dynamics and uncertainty to support reasoning about possible futures.

Representation methods for situationthats include formal ontologies, knowledge graphs, and structured data schemas. Practical implementations use formats such as JSON-LD or RDF to enable interoperability. Applications appear in planning systems, decision-support tools, natural language understanding, crisis management simulations, and educational platforms that require explicit scenario descriptions.

Related concepts include situation awareness and situational context. The distinction is that situationthat provides a formal, reusable template for a particular case, whereas awareness or context may be more descriptive and less prescriptive. Limitations include standardization challenges, linguistic ambiguity, and computational complexity when modeling rich scenarios.