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KMi Seminars
Effective Integration of Declarative Rules with External Evaluations for Semantic Web Reasoning
This event took place on Monday 26 March 2007 at 11:30

 
Assistant Professor Giovambattista Ianni Department of Mathematics of University of Calabria

The Semantic Web vision needs formalisms for the Rule Layer that guarantee transparent interoperability with the Ontology Layer, clear semantics and full declarativity. HEX programs is a rule language featuring higher-order atoms, external atoms, negation-as-failure whose semantics is based on the notion of Answer Sets. They are aimed at providing a suitable tool for building the Rule Layer. Full declarativity, easiness to use, decidability, nondeterminism, nonmonotonicity, non-finite universe of individuals, smooth interfacing with the Ontology layer are the features HEX programs foster. It can be argued that these features enforce some strong design constraint that would compromise the practical adoption of this formalism in its full generality. To this end, although keeping desirable advantages, we identified classes of HEX programs feasible for implementation. A general method for combining and evaluating sub-programs belonging to arbitrary classes is introduced, thus enlarging the variety of programs whose execution is practicable.

The talk is a summary of the paper winner of the best prize award at ESWC 2006. First, the audience will be introduced to Answer Set Programming (ASP) giving a short survey of pros and cons of this technology, and showing several simple examples. It is then illustrated the realm of HEX programs (whose semantics is Answer Set Programming based), how the language can interact with Ontologies, which applications are foreseen for the language, and how the language is actually implemented.

Apologies that the first few minutes of this event are missing, this was due to a technical error in the recording process

 
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.