Semantic learning webs

By 2020, microprocessors will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper,scattered by the millions into the environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere. This will change everything around us, including the nature of commerce, the wealth of nations, and the way we communicate, work, play, and live. This will give us smart homes, cars, TVs , jewellery, and money. We will speak to our appliances, and they will speak back. Scientists also expect the Internet will wire up the entire planet and evolve into a membrane consisting of millions of computer networks, creating an “intelligent planet.” The Internet will eventually become a “Magic Mirror” that appears in fairy tales, able to speak with the wisdom of the human race. Michio Kaku, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the Twenty - First Century, 1998 If the semantic web needed a symbol, a good one to use would be a Navaho dream-catcher: a small web, lovingly hand-crafted, [easy] to look at, and rumored to catch dreams; but really more of a symbol than a reality. Pat Hayes, Catching the Dreams, 2002 Though it is almost impossible to envisage what the Web will be like by the end of the next decade, we can say with some certainty that it will have continued its seemingly unstoppable growth. Given the investment of time and money in the Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001), we can also be sure that some form of semanticization will have taken place. This might be superficial - accomplished simply through the addition of loose forms of meta-data mark-up, or more principled – grounded in ontologies and formalised by means of emerging semantic web standards, such as RDF (Lassila and Swick, 1999) or OWL (Mc Guinness and van Harmelen, 2003). Whatever the case, the addition of semantic mark-up will make at least part of the Web more readily accessible to humans and their software agents and will facilitate agent interoperability. If current research is successful there will also be a plethora of e-learning platforms making use of a varied menu of reusable educational material or learning objects. For the learner, the semanticized Web will, in addition, offer rich seams of diverse learning resources over and above the course materials (or learning objects) specified by course designers. For instance, the annotation registries, which provide access to marked up resources, will enable more focussed, ontologically-guided (or semantic) search. This much is already in development. But we can go much further. Semantic technologies make it possible not only to reason about the Web as if it is one extended knowledge base but also to provide a range of additional educational semantic web services such as summarization, interpretation or sense-making, structure-visualization, and support for argumentation

Arguement in the humanities: A knowledge based approach

In this thesis I have a threefold purpose. I will attempt: (a) to present a generic design for a tool - the Argument Support Program - which can be of use in supporting the reasoning of archaeologists (and others especially, but not exclusively, in the humanities); (b) I will present a model of argumentation and debate as the theoretical orientation within which the model is developed; and, (c) I will suggest that this approach is a natural development of several strands of research within the artificial intelligence community. A tripartite model of argument is presented in terms of arguers, the argument structure produced and the argument domain or field. This model subsumes reasoning, interpretation and argument exchange or debate. It is maintained, further, that while this model is generally applicable, specific domains have particular styles of argument. The notion of argument style is discussed in terms of the types of reasoning used. The related concept of relevance in argument is discussed in terms of the specific tokens of these types which may be used in a particular argument. It is argued that archaeology is characterized, at least in part, by the use of argument by analogy and argument from theoretical principles or models. A design for a generic program - the Argument Support Program (ASP) - based on the theoretical principles is delineated. Details of the partial implementation of the model as a constrained debater in the domain of archaeology (ASP for archaeology or ASParch) are presented. Example runs which illustrate how the characterizing features of archaeology are dealt with are also presented as are examples of the various domain and system knowledge bases needed. The application of ASPs to other domains and areas such as literary criticism, legal reasoning and Darwinian theory is discussed. In the final chapter, the achievements and inadequacies of this research are summarized, possible reasons are presented for the inadequacies in the resulting system and future directions discussed

A Community oriented approach to delivering learning services

In the past few years we have seen a growing interest in applying semantic web technologies to education. Much of this work has concentrated on the use of Learning Objects. This research is flawed in three ways: firstly, the notion of learning Objects(LOs) is deeply problematic, secondly, learners need more than ready access to pre-packaged fragments of knowledge, and, thirdly, a focus on LOs constrains the deployment of semantic web terminologies to the needs of providers and consumers of LOs. We propose an alternative approach which is not tied to LOs and which extends the use of semantic technologies as a means of providing learning services which are owned and created by a knowledge community

From knowledge repository to knowledge space

Management literature recognizes that knowledge is replacing more traditional sources of competitive advantage, and perhaps the only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to use and embed knowledge into an organization’s life. In this chapter, we look at the notion of embedding knowledge chunks in a variety of contexts from the viewpoint of ontological frames. We suggest a three level typology that was driving our efforts to develop a knowledge-rich application based on Semantic Web technologies. The core concepts refer to our Frame-Annotate-Navigate framework, and we discuss this extrapolation in terms of moving from designing knowledge portals and centralized repositories toward supporting open and modular knowledge spaces

Achieving Higher-level Learning Through Adaptable Semantic Web Applications

In this paper we propose refocusing the research from knowledge portals towards frameworks, which the end user can apply in many decision-making scenarios and which we call ‘personal portals’. Rather than pouring resources into a centralised access to knowledge repository, we suggest a more distributed approach to accessing knowledge. The core facets of such approach include: • choice from multiple ontologies • dynamic selection of ontological frames • customisation of user interaction and knowledge-level inference results • decoupling the content from a variety of contexts using the principles of conceptual (re-)framing. A prototype of such approach Magpie is described to illustrate some of these tenets. Magpie is our ‘zero-overhead’ suite of tools facilitating three distinct perspectives on the Semantic Web: as a methodology for supporting the interpretation of web resources through ‘ontological lenses’, as a tool kit for supporting and realising Semantic Web browsing, and as a framework for building semantic web applications

Second Generation Expert Systems, Explanations, Arguments and Archaeology.

: It is claimed that second generation expert systems provide a means of solving some of the problems put forward recently by writers on AI and archaeology (Huggett 1985, Huggett and Baker 1985, Baker 1986, Reilly 1985). Various kinds of second generation expert system are presented - in particular a variant I call the arguing expert system (AES). A program - the Argument Support Program for Archaeology (ASPA) - is proposed to illustrate these ideas. It is shown to provide possible solutions to (a) the problem of the inadequacy of the abstraction captured in the knowledge base of an expert system and the attendant danger of its fossilization and (b) the problem raised by the inability of expert systems to model nondeductive reasoning. The former is dealt with by giving the user the chance to get the system to 'change its mind' by engaging the system in a sustained argument exchange. This has the effect of allowing the user to supplement or modify the knowledge base in a principled way ..

An Architecture for the Integration of Heterogenous Inference Systems

: Embedded approaches to the design of hybrid architectures for knowledge representation and reasoning organize the component inference tools around a designated kernel, which provides the basic problem-solving mode of the architecture. This approach suffers from lack of flexibility as the chosen kernel might not always provide the most appropriate control and problem-solving architecture for the task in hand. Moreover, because embedded approaches emphasize communication between the component tools and the kernel, they typically provide only limited mechanisms for cooperation and communication between component tools. An alternative method of integrating inference systems is through the design of nonembedded architectures, where the component inference tools cooperate as 'equals', as none of them provides the structuring problem-solving organization. This alternative approach is more flexible and modular, and emphasizes aspects dealing with inter-tool communication and cooperation. Ho..

Alice: assisting online shoppers through ontologies and novel interface metaphors

In this paper we describe some results of the Alice project. Alice is an ontology based e-commerce project which aims to support online users in the task of shopping. Ontologies describing customers, products, typical shopping tasks and the external context form the basis for the Alice architecture. We also exploit two novel interface metaphors originally developed for navigating databases: the Guides metaphor and Dynamic Queries. The Guides metaphor was developed at Apple to reduce the cognitive load on learners navigating a large hypermedia database. Within Alice we use the Guides metaphor to allow online shoppers to classify themselves. We discuss the link between Alice Guides and Kozinet�s notion of e-tribes or Virtual Communities of Consumption. Our second interface metaphor Dynamic Queries (coupled with Starfield displays) allow users to very quickly find relevant items by displaying the results of queries, posed via specialised slider widgets, within 100 milliseconds. We have constructed a tool, Quiver, which constructs Dynamic Query interfaces on-the-fly as the result of queries to knowledge models stored on the Alice server

An Open Framework for Cooperative Problem Solving

Hybrid, knowledge-based systems comprise a number of heterogeneous agents, which make use of different knowledge representation languages. The VITAL-KR is a software architecture providing the basic sub-structure for integrating a number of software and human agents which cooperate during problem solving. In this paper we give an overview of the architecture of the VITAL-KR and show how it supports the development of hybrid applications, comprising both human and heterogeneous software agents, and the integration of pre-existing software modules into an application. The VITAL-KR provides a number of advantages over alternative AI programming environments, which make it well-suited for the development of hybrid, knowledge-based applications. Its communication primitives are generic, as they do not depend on the structure of a particular knowledge representation system; it is extendible, as it provides well-defined mechanisms for integrating new software modules; it enjoys a formal, unambiguous specification; it comprises mechanisms to ensure the consistency of the overall, hybrid knowledge base; and it provides a uniform mechanism for integrating both software and human agents