Extending the design process into the knowledge of the world

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We briefly discuss how such a semantic web of building information can be set up, and how this can be linked to a wealth of information freely available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud

Explanation Retrieval in Semantic Networks : Understanding Spreading Activation based Recommendations

Spreading Activation is a well-known semantic search technique to determine the relevance of nodes in a semantic network. When used for decision support, meaningful explanations of semantic search results are crucial for the user’s acceptance and trust. Usually, explanations are generated based on the original network. Indeed, the data accumulated during the spreading activation process contains semantically extremely valuable information. Therefore, our approach exploits the so-called spread graph, a specific data structure that comprises the spreading progress data. In this paper, we present a three-step explanation retrieval method based on spread graphs. We show how to retrieve the most relevant parts of a network by minimization and extraction techniques and formulate meaningful explanations. The evaluation of the approach is then performed with a prototypical decision support system for automotive safety analyses

Ontologies on the semantic web

As an informational technology, the World Wide Web has enjoyed spectacular success. In just ten years it has transformed the way information is produced, stored, and shared in arenas as diverse as shopping, family photo albums, and high-level academic research. The “Semantic Web” was touted by its developers as equally revolutionary but has not yet achieved anything like the Web’s exponential uptake. This 17 000 word survey article explores why this might be so, from a perspective that bridges both philosophy and IT

Natural‐language processing applied to an ITS interface

The aim of this paper is to show that with a subset of a natural language, simple systems running on PCs can be developed that can nevertheless be an effective tool for interfacing purposes in the building of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). After presenting the special characteristics of the Smalltalk/V language, which provides an appropriate environment for the development of an interface, the overall architecture of the interface module is discussed. We then show how sentences are parsed by the interface, and how interaction takes place with the user. The knowledge‐acquisition phase is subsequently described. Finally, some excerpts from a tutoring session concerned with elementary geometry are discussed, and some of the problems and limitations of the approach are illustrated

Planning accessible explanations for entailments in OWL ontologies

A useful enhancement of an NLG system for verbalising ontologies would be a module capable of explaining undesired entailments of the axioms encoded by the developer. This task raises interesting issues of content planning. One approach, useful as a baseline, is simply to list the subset of axioms relevant to inferring the entailment; however, in many cases it will still not be obvious, even to OWL experts, why the entailment follows. We suggest an approach in which further statements are added in order to construct a proof tree, with every step based on a relatively simple deduction rule of known difficulty; we also describe an empirical study through which the difficulty of these simple deduction patterns has been measured

Bounded Rationality and Heuristics in Humans and in Artificial Cognitive Systems

In this paper I will present an analysis of the impact that the notion of “bounded rationality”, introduced by Herbert Simon in his book “Administrative Behavior”, produced in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In particular, by focusing on the field of Automated Decision Making (ADM), I will show how the introduction of the cognitive dimension into the study of choice of a rational (natural) agent, indirectly determined - in the AI field - the development of a line of research aiming at the realisation of artificial systems whose decisions are based on the adoption of powerful shortcut strategies (known as heuristics) based on “satisficing” - i.e. non optimal - solutions to problem solving. I will show how the “heuristic approach” to problem solving allowed, in AI, to face problems of combinatorial complexity in real-life situations and still represents an important strategy for the design and implementation of intelligent systems

Increasing information feed in the process of structural steel design

Research initiatives throughout history have shown how a designer typically makes associations and references to a vast amount of knowledge based on experiences to make decisions. With the increasing usage of information systems in our everyday lives, one might imagine an information system that provides designers access to the ‘architectural memories’ of other architectural designers during the design process, in addition to their own physical architectural memory. In this paper, we discuss how the increased adoption of semantic web technologies might advance this idea. We investigate to what extent information can be described with these technologies in the context of structural steel design. This investigation indicates significant possibilities regarding information reuse in the process of structural steel design and, by extent, in other design contexts as well. However, important obstacles and question remarks can still be outlined as well