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

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

Towards Closed World Reasoning in Dynamic Open Worlds (Extended Version)

The need for integration of ontologies with nonmonotonic rules has been gaining importance in a number of areas, such as the Semantic Web. A number of researchers addressed this problem by proposing a unified semantics for hybrid knowledge bases composed of both an ontology (expressed in a fragment of first-order logic) and nonmonotonic rules. These semantics have matured over the years, but only provide solutions for the static case when knowledge does not need to evolve. In this paper we take a first step towards addressing the dynamics of hybrid knowledge bases. We focus on knowledge updates and, considering the state of the art of belief update, ontology update and rule update, we show that current solutions are only partial and difficult to combine. Then we extend the existing work on ABox updates with rules, provide a semantics for such evolving hybrid knowledge bases and study its basic properties. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an update operator is proposed for hybrid knowledge bases.Comment: 40 pages; an extended version of the article published in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 10 (4-6): 547 - 564, July. Copyright 2010 Cambridge University Pres

Reasoning-Supported Quality Assurance for Knowledge Bases

The increasing application of ontology reuse and automated knowledge acquisition tools in ontology engineering brings about a shift of development efforts from knowledge modeling towards quality assurance. Despite the high practical importance, there has been a substantial lack of support for ensuring semantic accuracy and conciseness. In this thesis, we make a significant step forward in ontology engineering by developing a support for two such essential quality assurance activities

Proceedings of the Automated Reasoning Workshop (ARW 2019)

Preface This volume contains the proceedings of ARW 2019, the twenty sixths Workshop on Automated Rea- soning (2nd{3d September 2019) hosted by the Department of Computer Science, Middlesex University, England (UK). Traditionally, this annual workshop which brings together, for a two-day intensive pro- gramme, researchers from different areas of automated reasoning, covers both traditional and emerging topics, disseminates achieved results or work in progress. During informal discussions at workshop ses- sions, the attendees, whether they are established in the Automated Reasoning community or are only at their early stages of their research career, gain invaluable feedback from colleagues. ARW always looks at the ways of strengthening links between academia, industry and government; between theoretical and practical advances. The 26th ARW is affiliated with TABLEAUX 2019 conference. These proceedings contain forteen extended abstracts contributed by the participants of the workshop and assembled in order of their presentations at the workshop. The abstracts cover a wide range of topics including the development of reasoning techniques for Agents, Model-Checking, Proof Search for classical and non-classical logics, Description Logics, development of Intelligent Prediction Models, application of Machine Learning to theorem proving, applications of AR in Cloud Computing and Networking. I would like to thank the members of the ARW Organising Committee for their advice and assis- tance. I would also like to thank the organisers of TABLEAUX/FroCoS 2019, and Andrei Popescu, the TABLEAUX Conference Chair, in particular, for the enormous work related to the organisation of this affiliation. I would also like to thank Natalia Yerashenia for helping in preparing these proceedings. London Alexander Bolotov September 201

Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade

Digital Humanities and Information Systems: Innovating Two Research Traditions

According to the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey the scope of the humanities is the experience of the world, the expression of these experiences and the understanding of these expressions. The Information Systems (IS) discipline deals with human experiences of computer systems as much as with the expressions of the world in the digital media and, therefore, can be seen as the humanities of the digital realm. Hence, it appears to be very fruitful to promote a closer cooperation between the two evolving disciplines of IS and the Digital Humanities, which aims to include the digital world in the humanities. The only barrier to such a collaboration lies in the relative unawareness of each other. This paper wants to make a contribution to change this. It postulates that both research traditions can be innovated by moving closer to each other and by collaborating on an interdisciplinary level

Pashto Border Literature as Geopolitical Knowledge

In this article I read a selection of Pashto literatures as critical thought about geopolitics. Drawing on Michael Shapiro’s concept of aesthetic subjects, as well as on border theory, I argue that the authors, the content, and the literary networks of these works all comment on global relations of power, ranging from the local bordering effects of geopolitics, to systems of knowledge embedded in the spatiality and temporality of empire. I argue that past and current imperial processes have led to fragmenting effects in Afghan society, and literature both reflects and analyzes this. Beyond that, I argue—through the examples of authors’ lives as well as their work—that literary activity in Pashto has actively negotiated such processes throughout its history, and offers strategies for countervailing notions of global connectivity in action as well as thought. The decentralized and multiperspective images of life in these works sit in counterpoint not only to the systems-oriented views that drive military and other policy in Afghanistan during the ongoing US moment, but also to universalist perspectives upon which disciplines like world history and geopolitics traditionally rely. Additionally, though, Pashto literary networks themselves also produce alternative structures. This contributes to the aesthetic turn in IR by arguing that it is not only the aesthetic vision in works that challenges dominant knowledge; the shape of the Pashto literary formation itself, organic with its content, is an alternate form of knowledge-in-practice about the contemporary world