KMi Seminars
RAGS and beyond
This event took place on Wednesday 27 October 2004 at 12:45

 
Dr Roger Evans Information Technology Research Institute, University of Brighton

The RAGS project ('Reference Architecture for Generation Systems'; Brighton/Edinburgh, EPSRC) aimed to build a concrete infrastructure for collaborative Natural Language Generation (NLG) research, founded on an apparent emerging architectural consensus among NLG system builders. However, a detailed survey of these existing systems revealed that the 'consensus' was much less secure than it appeared at first sight. In order to achieve the goals of the project, we started to develop a much more sophisticated view of system architectures, flexible enough to accommodate existing research, yet precise enough to make a useful contribution as a collaborative 'plug-and-play' framework for NLG. The resulting approach asks interesting and challenging questions about the nature of data manipulation and functional 'modulehood' in large, complex, computational systems.


In this talk, I will describe the progressive development of these ideas, from the starting point of the problem revealed by the RAGS survey, through the RAGS two-level data model and functional architecture for NLG systems, and its implementation in the OASYS system, to subsequent work with Chris Mellish on functional vs implementation architectures, and my current ideas for developing a more generic architectural substrate.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

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