Towards an Action-Centric Ontology for Cooking Procedures Using Temporal Graphs

Abstract: Formalizing cooking procedures remains a challenging task due to their inherent complexity and ambiguity. We introduce an extensible domain-specific language for representing recipes as directed action graphs, capturing processes, transfers, environments, concurrency, and compositional structure. Our approach enables precise, modular modeling of complex culinary workflows. Initial manual evaluation on a full English breakfast recipe demonstrates the DSL's expressiveness and suitability for future automated recipe analysis and execution. This work represents initial steps towards an action-centric ontology for cooking, using temporal graphs to enable structured machine understanding, precise interpretation, and scalable automation of culinary processes - both in home kitchens and professional culinary settings.