KMi Seminars
Scalable Query Answering over Linked Ontological Data
This event took place on Wednesday 15 July 2009 at 11:30

 
DR. Jeff Pan University of Aberdeen, UK

Scalable query answering over ontologies is one of the most useful and important services to support Semantic Web applications. For example, more and more ontological vocabulary used in linked data. Approximation has been identified as a potential way to reduce the complexity of query answering over OWL DL ontologies. Existing approaches are mainly based on syntactic approximation of ontological axioms and queries. In this talk, I will firstly give an overview of description logics in general, which are the underpinning of the OWL DL standard, and query answering over DL-based ontologies in particular. Then I propose to recast the idea of knowledge compilation into semantically approximating OWL DL ontologies with DL-Lite ontologies, against which query answering has only LogSpace data complexity. We identify a useful category of queries for which our approach guarantees also completeness. If time allows, I will also report on the implementation of our approach in the TrOWL system and preliminary, but encouraging, benchmark results which compare TrOWL's response times on queries in a well known ontology benchmark with those of existing ontology reasoning systems. I will conclude the talk with discussions on some future steps.

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

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.