In dialogue processing applications where expressions like today'' or next week'' are used, it is necessary to know the current time. When doing regression testing, it is then useful to be able to set a notional time, so that responses to time-dependent utterances stay stable.

The {\tt SET\_\-NOTIONAL\_\-TIME} command makes it possible to set the identity of the notional time from the command-line. The format is YYYY-MM-DD\_HH-MM-SS, e.g. \begin{verbatim} SET_NOTIONAL_TIME 2010-08-04_15-17-55 \end{verbatim} The notional time can be retrieved using the predicate {\tt get\_\-notional\_\-time/1} in {\tt PrologLib/utilities.pl}.