KRR Group Meetings

Sanjiang Li

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Ander Altuna

It is a desirable feature of knowledge bases that they are able to accommodate and reason across the different perspectives that may exist on a particular theory or situation. With the aim of obtaining an adequate logic for this problem, the knowledge representation community has extensively researched into the formalization of contexts as first-class citizens. However, most of the proposed logics of context only deal with the propositional case, which for many applications is not enough, and those tackling the quantificational case face many counterintuitive restrictions. Here we present a model-theoretic semantics that, based on a cognitive approach to the notions of context and meaning, succeeds in addressing the quantificational case in a flexible manner that overcomes the limitations of the previous initiatives. The expressive power of the system will be evaluated by formalizing some of the benchmark examples that can be found in the literature.

John Stell

Project is funded by EPSRC and Ordnance Survey,
as part of which Mike Worboys (from University of Maine)
will be visiting Leeds for several weeks early next year.

Ilaria Corda,Vania Dimitrova, Ronald Denaux

Tuesday 1pm Level 8 Board Room

Presentation on Confluence Project: Link

Confluence (July 2007 - Oct 2008) is funded by Ordnance Survey UK (the UK Mapping Agency) and aims to develop a tool to support domain experts without knowledge engineering skills to construct a conceptual ontology. We are following a methodology for ontology construction developed at Ordnance Survey which includes the following phases:
  (a) defining ontology purpose and scope;
  (b) conceptual text analysis to identify main concepts and relations;
  (c) managing glossaries of concepts and relations;
  (d) ontology formulation in a natural language (then converted to OWL);
  (e) ontology verification and visualisation.

The talk will present our current work on (b) and (d). Ilaria will present a review of tools for conceptual knowledge extraction, as well as controlled language tools for ontology definition. Ronald will give a demo of the Confluence tool which is developed as a plug-in for Protege and uses Gate ( http://gate.ac.uk/ ) for parsing and conceptual text analysis.

Wednesday 3pm Active Learning Lab

Probabalistic logic learning

Link

Representation and Recognition of Compound Spatio-Temporal Entities:

A compound spatio-temporal entity can be described as a group of objects interacting as a coherent entity, such as a queue. A representation for compound spatio-temporal entities and some means of recognising the entity from video will be presented. I will also discuss possible ways of extending the idea to facilitate learning of the representation from example videos.

Wednesday 5th Sept 3pm Level 8 Boardroom

Image Retrieval through Qualitative Representations over Semantic Features. Link

Carl Schultz

Deptartment of Computer Science, University of Aukland

Tuesday 4th Sept 11am

Imagining Contexts:

The aim of this paper is to present a formal semantics inspired by the notion of Mental Imagery, largely researched in Cognitive Science and Experimental Psychology, that grasps the full significance of the concept of context. The outcomes presented here are considered important for both the Knowledge Representation and Philosophy of Language communities for two reasons. Firstly, the semantics that will be introduced allows to overcome some unjustified constraints imposed by previous quantificational languages of context, like flatness or the use of constant domains among others, and increases notably their expressive power. Secondly, it attempts to throw some light on the debate about the relation between meaning and truth by formally separating the conditions for a sentence to be meaningful from those that turn it true within
a context.

Nick Gibbins

School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton

Homepage

Monday 20th August at 1-2pm in room 6.08

Scalable Infrastructures for Semantic Web Applications:

The vision of the Semantic Web presented by Berners-Lee et al in their 2001 Scientific American article is of a future Web-scale information system in which the meaning of data is explicitly represented to enable mediation by intelligent agents. While many of the techniques used are familiar from the knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence communities, the deployment of these at Web-scale goes beyond previous work, and presents a number of new issues. Meanwhile, the Web 2.0 zeitgeist has led users to expect rich interactive environments in which they can easily explore and manipulate complex data. The development of Semantic Web applications which can maintain acceptable interactive performance on extremely large datasets is therefore a significant challenge. In this talk I will present an overview of the Semantic Web, the issues affecting the scalability of Semantic Web systems, and describe the work carried out in the Advanced Knowledge Technologies IRC towards the construction of scalable Semantic Web infrastructures.

Paulo Santos

IAAA- Artificial Intelligence in Automation group, Technical University FEI, Sao Paulo

Homepage

Onotlogy-based Representation and Reasoning about the history of Science.

Abstract: The use of ontologies enables semantically enriched access to a variety of digital resources. Historical domains impose a number of challenges to creating ontologies, e.g. modeling temporal relations, handling subjectivity, and dealing with vagueness. This research develops a case study in the History of Science that illustrates how to conceptualise and reason about a historical domain, and suggests an approach to model time and temporal relations. Based on existing methodologies for ontology construction, a methodology for conceptualising (a part of) the History of Science domain has been derived taking into account that the author has acted as both a domain expert and a knowledge engineer. Following the methodology, main concepts and relations in the History of Science have been identified. Special attention is paid at modeling temporal concepts and relations. A framework for conceptualising and reasoning about the History of Science is presented, combining Davidson's theory of events to represent temporal categories and Allen's interval logic to reason about temporal relations. Slides

Barbara Smith

Cork Constrainst Computation Centre, University College Cork

Homepage

3rd Workshop - Knowledge Integration: Website

Good Friday

50 years of computing at Leeds: Website

Grounding a geographic ontology on geographic data

Presentation for Commonsense 2007, paper

Alan Bundy

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Homepage

A Crisis in Mathematics.

Further details

Alan Bundy

School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Homepage

Cooperative Reasoning Processes: More Than Just the Sum of their Parts

Further details

Matthew West, Shell

Homepage

Prof Matthew West, Shell

Homepage

God's-eye view of history Powerpoint slides

Formalising a basic Hydro-ontology Powerpoint slides