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….

And at last, a paper from the thesis….

Accepted by & appearing at ICTAI (Int. Conf. on Tools for AI) ‘07 in Greece at the end of October 2007.

Ok, for anyone new (and interested) to help unpick my ramblings:
I’m a PhD Student at UCL, in London, UK. Although I’m also a (medical) doctor.
As my thesis, I’m trying to work on mixing ontologies and argumentation. This means we get a (much) richer set of possibilites for the arguments, and also means we get some non-monotonic reasoning on top of the ontology (which is much more use if you want to do proper KR, IMHO).

If you are still reading, and want to contact me, follow the link to the homepage and email me from there. I’m very happy to share ideas and code with anyone who’s interested.

I had been thinking about a rule syntax of the form A -> (B -> (C -> D)) where A is some source, B is some (non-optional) condition, C is some (optional) condition and D is some outcome. This then let’s us define a meta-rule of the form Value(D) -> A -> (B -> C), so developing arguments about interventions.

That step works (as long as we define pure Epistemic arguments as A -> (B -> ( -> D)) so we can still treat them the same), but I’m no longer sure it’s actually ‘true’.

The problem comes with the nature of “->”. Here, we are confalting the Toulmin style sense of ‘warrants’ (in that A ‘warrant s’ the fact that B -> (C -> D) with the implication C -> D. There’s also the fact that B doesn’t warrant the C -> D in the sam way as A does.

I think the solution is to change to A -> B1 & B2 -> C, where B2 is the optional bit. As a result, gets replaced by blank (which feels better). The only problem is that there is now no difference between B1 and B2, apart from convention - a case of syntax dictating semantics. Bad if you’re Roman, liveable with (I guess) if you’re English.

Have, mostly by accident, been having an interesting discussion on the Jena-dev mailing list on the understanding of ‘implication’.

Given A -> (B -> C), and understanding that -> represent defeasible implication, I read this as “A suggests that B implies C”. Dave’s point, correctly I think, is that some of the time, you need either A to _definitely_ say B -> C, or for A to suggest that B is _definitely_ C (although I think this is harder, as then I would try and put this in the ontology). Looks like I (ideally) need two forms of inference (maybe version 2.0….)

It important because of course it shows that I can’t depend on everyone else having the same prejudices as me….

After a long absence (Vietnam/ Christmas/ catching up)….

Working on logical syntax. Current idea is to use A -> (B ->(C -> D)) (a la Tony’s FOL syntax: Presentation of arguments and counterarguments for tentative scientific knowledge) but to extend it to allow people to argue about desirable course of action.

Over the last 3 months, I wrote a (very basic) ontology/ arg. structure, then sort-of worked. Useful for pining down some issues, though. Have been round, and round, and round in circles about trying to decide on a suitable rules engine. Have looked at Prolog + Ontologies (none worked, including Swoop + Rules), other rules engines (Drools, Bossam, Jena), SWRL Reasoners (Hoolet, Sweetrules). Finally realised that I’m going to have to write on myself….. help!
The big problem is that rules + argumentation is ok (e.g. Prolog, or Gerard Vreeswijk) and ontology and rules is ok (e.g. Jena) but all three is a big no-no….