Understand and characterise definition
Understand and characterise a behaviour means represent it by an ap- propriate pattern. A pattern may be viewed as a statement in some language [16]. The language may be chosen quite arbitrarily (e.g. natural language, mathematical formulas, graphical language); hence, the syntactic and mor- phological features of a pattern are irrelevant to data analysis. What is rele- vant is the meaning, or semantics. It is natural to assume that representations of the same behaviour in different languages have a common meaning. Hence, the constructs of the different languages refer to the same system of basic language-independent elements from which various meanings can be com- posed. By analogy with meanings of words in a natural language, we can posit that the basic semantic elements for building various patterns include pattern types and pattern properties. A specific pattern is an instantiation of one or more pattern types. This is analogous to the specialisation of a general notion by means of appropriate qualifiers. In the case of patterns, the qual- ifiers are specific values of the pattern properties. For example, the pattern ”entities e1, e2, ..., en moved together during the time period T” instanti- ates the pattern type ”joint movement” by specifying what entities and when moved in this manner.