In this paper, we describe the D-SCRIBE process used to build ontologies that are expected to have significant domain expansion after their initial introduction and whose coverage of concepts needs to be validated for a series of related applications. This process has been used to build SCRIBE, a very modular, ambitious ontology for the information about events triggered by both humans or nature, response activities by agencies that provide public services in cities by using resources and assets (land parcels, buildings, vehicles, equipment) and their communication (requests, work orders, sensor reports). SCRIBE reuses concepts from previously existing ontologies and data exchange standards, and D-SCRIBE retains traceability to these source influences.

Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models (e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years, the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally, we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.

In the era of Big Data, knowledge integration is key for tasks such as social media aggregation, opinion mining, and cyber-issue detection. The integration of different kinds of knowledge coming from multiple sources, however, is often a problematic issue as it either requires a lot of manual effort in defining aggregation rules or suffers from noise generated by automatic integration techniques. In this work, we propose a method based on conceptual primitives for efficiently integrating pieces of knowledge coming from different common and common-sense resources, which we test in the field of concept-level sentiment analysis.

The objective is to present one important aspect of the European IST-FET project "REV!GIS"1: the methodology which has been developed for the translation (interpretation) of the quality of the data into a "fitness for use" information, that we can confront to the user needs in its application. This methodology is based upon the notion of "ontologies" as a conceptual framework able to capture the explicit and implicit knowledge involved in the application. We do not address the general problem of formalizing such ontologies, instead, we rather try to illustrate this with three applications which are particular cases of the more general "data fusion" problem. In each application, we show how to deploy our methodology, by comparing several possible solutions, and we try to enlighten where are the quality issues, and what kind of solution to privilege, even at the expense of a highly complex computational approach. The expectation of the REV!GIS project is that computationally tractable solutions will be available among the next generation AI tools.

Psychophysical experiments have demonstrated that the brain integrates information from multiple sensory cues in a near Bayesian optimal manner. The present study proposes a novel mechanism to achieve this. We consider two reciprocally connected networks, mimicking the integration of heading direction information between the dorsal medial superior temporal (MSTd) and the ventral intraparietal (VIP) areas. Each network serves as a local estimator and receives an independent cue, either the visual or the vestibular, as direct input for the external stimulus. We find that positive reciprocal interactions can improve the decoding accuracy of each individual network as if it implements Bayesian inference from two cues. Our model successfully explains the experimental finding that both MSTd and VIP achieve Bayesian multisensory integration, though each of them only receives a single cue as direct external input. Our result suggests that the brain may implement optimal information integration distributively at each local estimator through the reciprocal connections between cortical regions.

How does the human visual system compute the speed of a coherent motion stimulus that contains motion energy in different spatiotemporal frequency bands? Here we propose that perceived speed is the result of optimal integration of speed information from independent spatiotemporal frequency tuned channels. We formalize this hypothesis with a Bayesian observer model that treats the channel activity as independent cues, which are optimally combined with a prior expectation for slow speeds. We test the model against behavioral data from a 2AFC speed discrimination task with which we measured subjects' perceived speed of drifting sinusoidal gratings with different contrasts and spatial frequencies, and of various combinations of these single gratings. We find that perceived speed of the combined stimuli is independent of the relative phase of the underlying grating components, and that the perceptual biases and discrimination thresholds are always smaller for the combined stimuli, supporting the cue combination hypothesis. The proposed Bayesian model fits the data well, accounting for perceptual biases and thresholds of both simple and combined stimuli. Fits are improved if we assume that the channel responses are subject to divisive normalization, which is in line with physiological evidence. Our results provide an important step toward a more complete model of visual motion perception that can predict perceived speeds for stimuli of arbitrary spatial structure.

Much of the focus on big data has been on the problem of processing very large sources.   There is an equally hard problem of how to normalize, integrate, and transform the data from many sources into the format required to run large-scale analysis and visualization tools.  We have previously developed an approach to semi-automatically mapping diverse sources into a shared domain ontology so that they can be quickly combined.  In this paper we describe our approach to building and executing integration and restructuring plans to support analysis and visualization tools on very large and diverse datasets.

In this paper, we describe a complex Soar agent that uses and learns multiple types of knowledge while interacting with a human in a real-world domain. Our hypothesis is that a diverse set of memories is required for the different types of knowledge. We first present the agent’s processing, highlighting the types of knowledge used for each phase. We then present Soar’s memories and identify which memory is used for each type of knowledge. We also analyze which properties of each memory make it appropriate for the knowledge it encodes. We conclude with a summary of our analysis.

In this paper we consider optimization as an approach for quickly and flexibly developing hybrid cognitive capabilities that are efficient, scalable, and can exploit knowledge to improve solution speed and quality. In this context, we focus on the Three-Weight Algorithm, which aims to solve general optimization problems. We propose novel methods by which to integrate knowledge with this algorithm to improve expressiveness, efficiency, and scaling, and demonstrate these techniques on two example problems (Sudoku and circle packing).

This paper evaluates heterogeneous information fusion using multi-task Gaussian processes in the context of geological resource modeling. Specifically, it empirically demonstrates that information integration across heterogeneous information sources leads to superior estimates of all the quantities being modeled, compared to modeling them individually. Multi-task Gaussian processes provide a powerful approach for simultaneous modeling of multiple quantities of interest while taking correlations between these quantities into consideration. Experiments are performed on large scale real sensor data.