Based on a typology of five basic forms of abduction, I propose a new definition of abductive insight that empha sizes in particular the inferential structure of a belief system that is able to explain a phenomenon after a new, abductive ly created component has been added to this system or the entire system has been abductively restructured. My thesis is, first, that the argumentative structure of the pursued problem solution guides abductive creativity and, second, that diagrammatic reasoning—if conceptualized according to the requirements defined by Charles Peirce—can support this guidance. This support is mainly possible based on the normative power of the system of representation that has to be used to construct diagrams and to perform experiments with them.

Tactile maps offer access to spatial-analog information for visually impaired people. In contrast to visual maps, a tactile map has a lower resolution and can only be inspected in a sequential way, complicating the extraction of spatial relations among distant map entities. Verbal assistance can help to overcome these difficulties by substituting textual labels with verbal descriptions and offering propositional knowledge about spatial relations. Like visual maps, tactile maps are based on visual, spatial-geometric representations that need to be reasoned about in order to generate verbal assistance. We present an approach towards a verbally assisting virtual-environment tactile map (VAVETaM) realized on a computer system utilizing a haptic force-feedback device. In particular, we discuss the tasks of understanding the user's map exploration procedures (MEPs), of exploiting the spatial-analog map to anticipate the user's informational needs, of reasoning about optimal assistance by taking assumed prior knowledge of the user into account, and of generating appropriate verbal instructions and descriptions to augment the map.

A distributed non-hierarchical metacognitive architec- ture is one in which all meta-level reasoning compo- nents are subject to meta-level monitoring and manage- ment by other components. Such metacognitive distri- bution can support the robustness of distributed IT sys- tems in which humans and artificial agents are partic- ipants. However, robust metacognition also needs to be context-aware and use diversity in its reasoning and analysis methods. Both these requirements mean that an agent evaluates its reasoning within a “bigger picture” and that it can monitor this global picture from multi- ple perspectives. In particular, social context-awareness involves understanding the goals and concerns of users and organisations. In this paper, we first present a conceptual architecture for distributed metacognition with context-awareness and diversity. We then consider the challenges of apply- ing this architecture to autonomic management systems in scenarios where agents must collectively diagnose and respond to errors and intrusions. Such autonomic systems need rich semantic knowledge and diverse data sources in order to provide the necessary context for their metacognitive evaluations and decisions.

Grounding is the task of reducing a first-order theory and finite domain to an equivalent propositional theory. It is used as preprocessing phase in many logic-based reasoning systems. Such systems provide a rich first-order input language to a user and can rely on efficient propositional solvers to perform the actual reasoning. Besides a first-order theory and finite domain, the input for grounders contains in many applications also additional data. By exploiting this data, the size of the grounder's output can often be reduced significantly. A common practice to improve the efficiency of a grounder in this context is by manually adding semantically redundant information to the input theory, indicating where and when the grounder should exploit the data. In this paper we present a method to compute and add such redundant information automatically. Our method therefore simplifies the task of writing input theories that can be grounded efficiently by current systems. We first present our method for classical first-order logic (FO) theories. Then we extend it to FO(ID), the extension of FO with inductive definitions, which allows for more concise and comprehensive input theories. We discuss implementation issues and experimentally validate the practical applicability of our method.

This article introduces the challenge of digital preservation in the area of engineering design and manufacturing and presents a methodology to apply knowledge representation and semantic techniques to develop Digital Engineering Archives. This work is part of an ongoing, multiuniversity, effort to create cyber infrastructure-based engineering repositories for undergraduates (CIBER-U) to support engineering design education. The technical approach is to use knowledge representation techniques to create formal models of engineering data elements, workflows and processes. With these formal engineering knowledge and processes can be captured and preserved with some guarantee of long-term interpretability.

This article introduces the challenge of digital preservation in the area of engineering design and manufacturing and presents a methodology to apply knowledge representation and semantic techniques to develop Digital Engineering Archives. This work is part of an ongoing, multiuniversity, effort to create cyber infrastructure-based engineering repositories for undergraduates (CIBER-U) to support engineering design education. The technical approach is to use knowledge representation techniques to create formal models of engineering data elements, workflows and processes. With these formal engineering knowledge and processes can be captured and preserved with some guarantee of long-term interpretability. The article presents examples of how the techniques can be used to encode specific engineering information packages and workflows. These techniques are being integrated into a semantic wiki that supports the CIBER-U engineering education activities across nine universities and involving over 3500 students since 2006.

We present tropical games, a generalization of combinatorial min-max games based on tropical algebras. Our model breaks the traditional symmetry of rational zero-sum games where players have exactly opposed goals (min vs. max), is more widely applicable than min-max and also supports a form of pruning, despite it being less effective than alpha-beta. Actually, min-max games may be seen as particular cases where both the game and its dual are tropical: when the dual of a tropical game is also tropical, the power of alpha-beta is completely recovered. We formally develop the model and prove that the tropical pruning strategy is correct, then conclude by showing how the problem of approximated parsing can be modeled as a tropical game, profiting from pruning.

We provide two approaches for explaining inconsistency in multi-context systems, where decentralized and heterogeneous system parts interact via nonmonotonic bridge rules. Inconsistencies arise easily in such scenarios, and nonmonotonicity calls for specific methods of inconsistency analysis. Both our approaches characterize inconsistency in terms of involved bridge rules: either by pointing out rules which need to be altered for restoring consistency, or by finding combinations of rules which cause inconsistency. We show duality and modularity properties, give precise complexity characterizations, and provide algorithms for computation using HEX-programs. Our results form a basis for inconsistency management in heterogeneous knowledge integration systems.

In particular, I will explain how the complexity scheduling, planning, graph problems, among others. The landscape differs for traditional reasoning and for query most well-known constraint satisfaction problem is propositional answering, and take a brief look at computational complexity satisfiability SAT. Of particular recent interest is satisfiability issues raised by implementations of DL query answering modulo theories (SMT), where the interpretation based on standard relational database systems. Throughout of some symbols is constrained by a background theory. For the tutorial, connections to the W3C-standard OWL are example, the theory of arithmetic restricts the interpretation drawn whenever possible. of symbols such as:,, 0, and 1. SMT draws on the most prolific problems in the past century What If You Wanted Someone (Else) to Use This?

We show that linear logic can serve as an expressive framework in which to model a rich variety of combinatorial auction mechanisms. Due to its resource-sensitive nature, linear logic can easily represent bids in combinatorial auctions in which goods may be sold in multiple units, and we show how it naturally generalises several bidding languages familiar from the literature. Moreover, the winner determination problem, i.e., the problem of computing an allocation of goods to bidders producing a certain amount of revenue for the auctioneer, can be modelled as the problem of finding a proof for a particular linear logic sequent.