4,121 research outputs found

    Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

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    The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

    Interval Neutrosophic Sets and Logic: Theory and Applications in Computing

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    A neutrosophic set is a part of neutrosophy that studies the origin, nature, and scope of neutralities, as well as their interactions with different ideational spectra. The neutrosophic set is a powerful general formal framework that has been recently proposed. However, the neutrosophic set needs to be specified from a technical point of view. Here, we define the set-theoretic operators on an instance of a neutrosophic set, and call it an Interval Neutrosophic Set (INS). We prove various properties of INS, which are connected to operations and relations over INS. We also introduce a new logic system based on interval neutrosophic sets. We study the interval neutrosophic propositional calculus and interval neutrosophic predicate calculus. We also create a neutrosophic logic inference system based on interval neutrosophic logic. Under the framework of the interval neutrosophic set, we propose a data model based on the special case of the interval neutrosophic sets called Neutrosophic Data Model. This data model is the extension of fuzzy data model and paraconsistent data model. We generalize the set-theoretic operators and relation-theoretic operators of fuzzy relations and paraconsistent relations to neutrosophic relations. We propose the generalized SQL query constructs and tuple-relational calculus for Neutrosophic Data Model. We also design an architecture of Semantic Web Services agent based on the interval neutrosophic logic and do the simulation study

    Indexing the Event Calculus with Kd-trees to Monitor Diabetes

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    Personal Health Systems (PHS) are mobile solutions tailored to monitoring patients affected by chronic non communicable diseases. A patient affected by a chronic disease can generate large amounts of events. Type 1 Diabetic patients generate several glucose events per day, ranging from at least 6 events per day (under normal monitoring) to 288 per day when wearing a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that samples the blood every 5 minutes for several days. This is a large number of events to monitor for medical doctors, in particular when considering that they may have to take decisions concerning adjusting the treatment, which may impact the life of the patients for a long time. Given the need to analyse such a large stream of data, doctors need a simple approach towards physiological time series that allows them to promptly transfer their knowledge into queries to identify interesting patterns in the data. Achieving this with current technology is not an easy task, as on one hand it cannot be expected that medical doctors have the technical knowledge to query databases and on the other hand these time series include thousands of events, which requires to re-think the way data is indexed. In order to tackle the knowledge representation and efficiency problem, this contribution presents the kd-tree cached event calculus (\ceckd) an event calculus extension for knowledge engineering of temporal rules capable to handle many thousands events produced by a diabetic patient. \ceckd\ is built as a support to a graphical interface to represent monitoring rules for diabetes type 1. In addition, the paper evaluates the \ceckd\ with respect to the cached event calculus (CEC) to show how indexing events using kd-trees improves scalability with respect to the current state of the art.Comment: 24 pages, preliminary results calculated on an implementation of CECKD, precursor to Journal paper being submitted in 2017, with further indexing and results possibilities, put here for reference and chronological purposes to remember how the idea evolve

    From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics

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    Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the literature for those who are less familiar with the field
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