DYNAMO-MAS: a multi-agent system for ontology evolution from text

International audienceManual ontology development and evolution are complex and time-consuming tasks, even when textual documents are used as knowledge sources in addition to human expertise or existing ontologies. Processing natural language in text produces huge amounts of linguistic data that need to be filtered out and structured. To support both of these tasks, we have developed DYNAMO-MAS, an interactive tool based on an adaptive multi-agent system (adaptive MAS or AMAS) that builds and evolves ontologies from text. DYNA-MO-MAS is a partner system to build ontologies; the ontologist interacts with the system to validate or modify its outputs. This paper presents the architecture of DYNAMO-MAS, its operating principles and its evaluation on three case studies

Terminae Method and Integration Process for Legal Ontology Building

This paper describes the contruction method of a legal application ontology. This method is based on the merging of micro-ontologies built from European community directives. The \textsc{terminae} construction method from texts enhanced by an alignment process with a core legal ontology is used for building micro-ontologies. A merging process allows constructing the legal ontology

Automatic Detection and Semantic Formalisation of Business Rules

International audienceExperts in construction engineering are overwhelmed by regulatory texts. It is a heavy task to go through these texts and get an unambiguous list of requirements they contain. Moreover, with regard to the number of texts and the diversity of their writers, we cannot neglect the possibility of getting inconsistencies. Finally, these requirements are to be put close to digital representation of buildings to detect potential non-conformities. This paper examines these problems and envisions solutions to help experts. We thus envisage to automate detection and extraction of business rules in regulatory texts. Next, we propose to formalise identified requirements as SPARQL queries. These queries will serve for conformity checking on OWL-representation of buildings. Moreover, we plan to leverage these queries to detect inconsistencies in regulatory texts

Observing Apparent Nonuniform Sensitivity Enhancements in Dynamic Nuclear Polarization Solid-State NMR Spectra of Polymers

International audienceHigh-field dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP)may enhance the sensitivity of solid-state NMR experimentson a wide range of systems, including synthetic polymers,owing to the transfer of electron spin polarization from radicalsto nuclei upon microwave irradiation (usually at cryogenictemperatures). Provided that the radicals are homogeneouslydispersed in the sample, a uniform DNP enhancement isexpected for all the signals in the 13C cross-polarization magicangle spinning (CPMAS) spectrum. Here, we show that, in thecase of methyl group containing polymers, a change in thecross-polarization (CP) dynamics induced by the moderate increase in sample temperature due to microwave irradiation maylead to the observation of apparent nonuniform enhancements in the DNP-enhanced 13C CPMAS spectra. This peculiarbehavior should be accounted for when measuring 13C CP DNP enhancements on polymer materials, especially forheterogeneous polymer samples (for which truly nonuniform DNP enhancements could potentially be detected), or whenquantitative results are sought

Optimizing Sample Preparation Methods for Dynamic Nuclear Polarization Solid-state NMR of Synthetic Polymers

International audienceThis work compares the overall sensitivity enhancements provided by dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) for the solid-state NMR characterization of polymer samples doped with biradicals and prepared either by film casting (FC), or by glass forming (GF) using 1,1,2,2-tetrachloroethane as the solvent. Analysis of amorphous and semicrystalline polymers (polystyrene, poly(ethylene oxide), polylactide, poly(methyl methacrylate)) of varying molecular weights showed that GF provided larger sensitivity enhancements than FC but yielded DNP-enhanced 13C CPMAS spectra of lower resolution for semicrystalline polymers, owing to line-broadening due to conformational distribution of the polymer chains in frozen solution. Moreover, use of deuterated solvents significantly reduced the intensity of the solvent signals in the DNP-enhanced 13C CPMAS spectra of polymers prepared by GF, while preserving the sensitivity enhancement observed for the polymer signals. For the polymers investigated here, both FC and GF performed better than incipient wetness impregnation, yielding overall sensitivity enhancements between 5 and 40