News Story

Best Demo Award at EKAW!

Chloe Bays, Thursday 5 Jan 2017

It should come as no surprise that KMi’ers once again gain recognition for their outstanding work. Ilaria Tiddi, Emanuele Bastianelli, Enrico Daga and Mathieu d’Aquin won the Best Demo Award for their paper ‘DKA-robo: dynamically updating time-invalid knowledge bases using robots’ at EKAW (The 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management), which took place in Bologna, Italy between 19 – 23 November 2016.

The paper focuses on Information gathered from the real world and how it can tend to vary in time. The temperature of a room, the number of people in a bar or even the strength of a wi-fi signal are affected by a large number of factors. Indeed, managing the dynamic information of knowledge bases constitutes a key issue in many real-world scenarios, because constantly reevaluating data requires efforts in terms of knowledge acquisition and representation. Ilaria, Emanuele, Enrico and Mathieu developed a system where a mobile agent is used to update those statements of a knowledge base that has lost validity in time. They chose to use Semantic Web technologies to represent and manage the time-validity of information, combined with an agent acting as a mobile sensor, which updates the outdated statements in the knowledge base, therefore always guaranteeing time-valid results against user queries. This demo, that we called DKA-robo (Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition with a Robot), presented the implementation of our approach based on the simulated working environment of their research lab. Conference attendees were shown how a robot can be instructed to move and sense information, and how the evaluated plan is executed to preserve the time-validity of the knowledge base.