KMi Seminars
All You Can Eat Ontology-Building: Feeding Wikipedia to Cyc
This event took place on Wednesday 22 April 2009 at 11:30

 
Dr Catherine Legg Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand

In order to achieve a genuinely intelligent World Wide Web, it seems that building some kind of general machine-readable ontology is an inescapable task. Yet the past 20 years have shown that hand-coding formal ontologies is not practicable. A recent explosion of free user-supplied knowledge on the Web has led to great strides in automatic ontology-building (e.g. YAGO, DBpedia), but here quality-control is still a major issue. Ideally one should automatically build onto an already intelligent base. I suggest that the long-running Cyc project can finally come into its own here, describing methods developed at the University of Waikato over the past summer whereby 35K new concepts mined from Wikipedia were added to appropriate Cyc collections, and automatically categorized as instances or subcollections. Most importantly, Cyc itself was leveraged for ontological quality control by ‘feeding’ assertions to it one by one, allowing it to ‘regurgitate’ those that are ontologically unsound. Cyc is arguably the only ontology currently sophisticated enough to be able to perform such a ‘digestive’ function, using its principled taxonomic structure and purpose-built inference engine. It is suggested that a traditional fixation of AI researchers on realizing the intelligence of the brain has perhaps caused us to overlook more humble yet genuine steps towards the AI vision which might be gained by realizing the intelligence of the stomach.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities