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KMi Seminars
Problem solving and mathematical knowledge
This event took place on Friday 10 December 2010 at 11:30

 
Joe Corneli

I will give a brief retrospective on the past year at KMi and talk a little bit about what brought me here in the first place! I will then spend the rest of the time discussing my plan for the next two years. Succinctly, the plan is to build a problem-solving layer over the encyclopedia layer that comprises the central feature of the current PlanetMath.org. Research will proceed by examining the activities of people in this space (e.g. connecting, discussing, working, recording, sharing, learning, etc.) and analysis of these pursuant to creating useful recommendations for learners. I am particularly interested in looking at the ways problem-solving connects with encodings of knowledge in the encyclopedia layer. Comments and criticisms are welcome; and, to this end, please come with an opinion about the following motivating quote: "Outsiders see mathematics as a cold, formal, logical, mechanical, monolithic process of sheer intellection; we argue that insofar as it is successful, mathematics is a social, informal, intuitive, organic, human process, a community project." -- Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, by DeMillo, Lipton, and Perlis.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.