Representing Dependencies in Event Structures

Abstract

Event structures where the causality may explicitly change during a computation have recently gained the stage. In this kind of event structures the changes in the set of the causes of an event are triggered by modifiers that may add or remove dependencies, thus making the happening of an event contextual. Still the focus is always on the dependencies of the event. In this paper we promote the idea that the context determined by the modifiers plays a major role, and the context itself determines not only the causes but also what causality should be. Modifiers are then used to understand when an event (or a set of events) can be added to a configuration, together with a set of events modeling dependencies, which will play a less important role. We show that most of the notions of Event Structure presented in literature can be translated into this new kind of event structure, preserving the main notion, namely the one of configuration.