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KMi Seminars
Explainable Systems
This event took place on Monday 09 May 2005 at 10:00

 
Dr. Paulo Pinheiro da Silva

When most current applications return answers, many users do not know what information sources were used, when they were updated, how reliable the source was, or what information was looked up versus derived. Many users also do not know how answers were derived. In this talk, we first show examples of explanations helping users to understand and trust system answers. Then we introduce the Inference Web (IW), our solution that enables explainable systems. IW aims to take opaque query answers and make the answers more transparent by providing infrastructure for presenting and managing explanations. The explanations include information concerning where answers came from (knowledge provenance) and how they were derived (or retrieved). The infrastructure includes:
  • IWBase: an extensible web-based registry containing details
    about information sources, reasoners, languages, and rewrite rules;

  • PML: the Proof Markup Language, an interlingua representation
    for justifications of results produced by software systems; and

  • a comprehensive tool suite for browsing, checking and
    abstracting proofs, and explaining answers through dialogues with users.
Finally, we report on current Inference Web applications including details about two of these applications: explaining extraction as inference in support of IBM's Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) effort, and explaining task processing as inference in support of DARPA PAL's CALO personal assistant project.

Download PowerPoint Presentation (1.0Mb ZIP file)

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

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.