Adhominem

Just back from ICTAI ‘07. Some quick notes:

Keynote
A good keynote by Ian Horrocks - even though I was familiar with most of the stuff, it was good to see it so clearly presented & explained. Slides here.

Ontologies are useful
So, I’m biased because I do some work that involves ontologies, but even so it was very obvious that there are quite a few people from different backgrounds (such as Case Based Reasoning & Robotics) who have a need for some clear hierarchical arrangement of a world model, and have used OWL ontologies to do it.

The interesting thing is the extent to which much of this was actually backgrounded - people sort of accepted that these formats & tools existed, and simply used them to get something done, which is a reflection on how much hard work has been done by the DL/ Ontology community in getting things to this stage. Frequent namechecks for Jena, Pellet and Racer among others.

Some specific links for those interested (mostly to home pages, as papers not up yet):

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Perceptual Anchoring (uses the DOLCE ontology) presented by
Amy Loutfi

Natural Language queries in CBR systems presented by B. Diaz- Agudo

Enriching OWL Ontologies with Linguistic and User-related Annotations: the ELEON system.
Paper

There was also some stuff just using RDF, rather than ontologies; One of the most interesting was this one:

First Steps towards an Intelligent Catalogue within the Open European Nephrology Science Center –OpEN.SC
A Nephrology DB in RDF

Talking to one of the authors, the most interesting finding was that they found rdf to simply be “a good thing” for integrating data from different legacy DBs.

Apart from that, a good overview of lots of AI things I knew nothing about (Conflict sets, Formal Concept Analysis, K-Means). And compliments on my attempts at Greek dancing….