Legal decision-making process requires the availability of comprehensive and detailed legislative background knowledge and up-to-date information on legal cases and related sentences/decisions. Legal Knowledge Graphs (KGs) would be a valuable tool to facilitate access to legal information, to be queried and exploited for the purpose, and to enable advanced reasoning and machine learning applications. Indeed, legal KGs may act as knowledge intensive component to be used by pre-dictive machine learning solutions supporting the decision process of the legal expert. Nevertheless, a few KGs can be found in the legal domain. To fill this gap, we developed a legal KG targeting legal cases of violence against women, along with clear adopted methodologies. Specifically, the paper introduces two complementary approaches for automated legal KG construction; a systematic bottom-up approach, customized for the legal domain, and a new solution leveraging Large Language Models. Starting from legal sentences publicly available from the European Court of Justice, the solutions integrate structured data extraction, ontology development, and semantic enrichment to produce KGs tailored for legal cases involving violence against women. After analyzing and comparing the results of the two approaches, the developed KGs are validated via suitable competency questions. The obtained KG may be impactful for multiple purposes: can improve the accessibility to legal information both to humans and machine, can enable complex queries and may constitute an important knowledge component to be possibly exploited by machine learning tools tailored for predictive justice.

Cognitive imagination is a type of imagination that plays a key role in human thinking. It is not a ``picture-in-the-head'' imagination. It is a faculty to mentally visualize coherent and holistic systems of concepts and causal links that serve as semantic contexts for reasoning, decision making and prediction. Our position is that the role of cognitive imagination is still greatly underestimated, and this creates numerous problems and diminishes the current capabilities of AI. For instance, when reasoning, humans rely on imaginary contexts to retrieve background info. They also constantly return to the context for semantic verification that their reasoning is still reasonable. Thus, reasoning without imagination is blind. This paper is a call for greater attention to cognitive imagination as the next promising breakthrough in artificial intelligence. As an instrument for simulating cognitive imagination, we propose semantic models -- a new approach to mathematical models that can learn, like neural networks, and are based on probabilistic causal relationships. Semantic models can simulate cognitive imagination because they ensure the consistency of imaginary contexts and implement a glass-box approach that allows the context to be manipulated as a holistic and coherent system of interrelated facts glued together with causal relations.

In large-scale maintenance organizations, identifying subject matter experts and managing communications across complex entities relationships poses significant challenges -- including information overload and longer response times -- that traditional communication approaches fail to address effectively. We propose a novel framework that combines RDF graph databases with LLMs to process natural language queries for precise audience targeting, while providing transparent reasoning through a planning-orchestration architecture. Our solution enables communication owners to formulate intuitive queries combining concepts such as equipment, manufacturers, maintenance engineers, and facilities, delivering explainable results that maintain trust in the system while improving communication efficiency across the organization.

Taxonomies and ontologies of research topics (e.g., MeSH, UMLS, CSO, NLM) play a central role in providing the primary framework through which intelligent systems can explore and interpret the literature. However, these resources have traditionally been manually curated, a process that is time-consuming, prone to obsolescence, and limited in granularity. This paper presents Sci-OG, a semi-auto\-mated methodology for generating research topic ontologies, employing a multi-step approach: 1) Topic Discovery, extracting potential topics from research papers; 2) Relationship Classification, determining semantic relationships between topic pairs; and 3) Ontology Construction, refining and organizing topics into a structured ontology. The relationship classification component, which constitutes the core of the system, integrates an encoder-based language model with features describing topic occurrence in the scientific literature. We evaluate this approach against a range of alternative solutions using a dataset of 21,649 manually annotated semantic triples. Our method achieves the highest F1 score (0.951), surpassing various competing approaches, including a fine-tuned SciBERT model and several LLM baselines, such as the fine-tuned GPT4-mini. Our work is corroborated by a use case which illustrates the practical application of our system to extend the CSO ontology in the area of cybersecurity. The presented solution is designed to improve the accessibility, organization, and analysis of scientific knowledge, thereby supporting advancements in AI-enabled literature management and research exploration.

A common use of machine learning (ML) models is predicting the class of a sample. Object detection is an extension of classification that includes localization of the object via a bounding box within the sample. Classification, and by extension object detection, is typically evaluated by counting a prediction as incorrect if the predicted label does not match the ground truth label. This pass/fail scoring treats all misclassifications as equivalent. In many cases, class labels can be organized into a class taxonomy with a hierarchical structure to either reflect relationships among the data or operator valuation of misclassifications. When such a hierarchical structure exists, hierarchical scoring metrics can return the model performance of a given prediction related to the distance between the prediction and the ground truth label. Such metrics can be viewed as giving partial credit to predictions instead of pass/fail, enabling a finer-grained understanding of the impact of misclassifications. This work develops hierarchical scoring metrics varying in complexity that utilize scoring trees to encode relationships between class labels and produce metrics that reflect distance in the scoring tree. The scoring metrics are demonstrated on an abstract use case with scoring trees that represent three weighting strategies and evaluated by the kind of errors discouraged. Results demonstrate that these metrics capture errors with finer granularity and the scoring trees enable tuning. This work demonstrates an approach to evaluating ML performance that ranks models not only by how many errors are made but by the kind or impact of errors. Python implementations of the scoring metrics will be available in an open-source repository at time of publication.

The ability to extract structured information from unstructured sources-such as free-text documents and scientific literature-is critical for accelerating scientific discovery and knowledge synthesis. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various natural language processing tasks, including structured information extraction. However, their effectiveness often diminishes in specialized, domain-specific contexts that require nuanced understanding and expert-level domain knowledge. In addition, existing LLM-based approaches frequently exhibit poor transferability across tasks and domains, limiting their scalability and adaptability. To address these challenges, we introduce StructSense, a modular, task-agnostic, open-source framework for structured information extraction built on LLMs. StructSense is guided by domain-specific symbolic knowledge encoded in ontologies, enabling it to navigate complex domain content more effectively. It further incorporates agentic capabilities through self-evaluative judges that form a feedback loop for iterative refinement, and includes human-in-the-loop mechanisms to ensure quality and validation. We demonstrate that StructSense can overcome both the limitations of domain sensitivity and the lack of cross-task generalizability, as shown through its application to diverse neuroscience information extraction tasks.

The rapid expansion of publicly-available medical data presents a challenge for clinicians and researchers alike, increasing the gap between the volume of scientific literature and its applications. The steady growth of studies and findings overwhelms medical professionals at large, hindering their ability to systematically review and understand the latest knowledge. This paper presents an approach to information extraction and automatic knowledge graph (KG) generation to identify and connect biomedical knowledge. Through a pipeline of large language model (LLM) agents, the system decomposes 44 PubMed abstracts into semantically meaningful proposition sentences and extracts KG triples from these sentences. The triples are enhanced using a combination of open domain and ontology-based information extraction methodologies to incorporate ontological categories. On top of this, a context variable is included during extraction to allow the triple to stand on its own - thereby becoming `quadruples'. The extraction accuracy of the LLM is validated by comparing natural language sentences generated from the enhanced triples to the original propositions, achieving an average cosine similarity of 0.874. The similarity for generated sentences of enhanced triples were compared with generated sentences of ordinary triples showing an increase as a result of the context variable. Furthermore, this research explores the ability for LLMs to infer new relationships and connect clusters in the knowledge base of the knowledge graph. This approach leads the way to provide medical practitioners with a centralised, updated in real-time, and sustainable knowledge source, and may be the foundation of similar gains in a wide variety of fields.

The Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) 3.6's mandatory 2026 implementation transforms residential property valuation from narrative reporting to structured, machine-readable formats. This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of this regulatory shift alongside concurrent AI advances in computer vision, natural language processing, and autonomous systems. We develop a three-layer framework for AI-augmented valuation addressing technical implementation and institutional trust requirements. Our analysis reveals how regulatory standardization converging with AI capabilities enables fundamental market restructuring with profound implications for professional practice, efficiency, and systemic risk. We make four key contributions: (1) documenting institutional failures including inter-appraiser variability and systematic biases undermining valuation reliability; (2) developing an architectural framework spanning physical data acquisition, semantic understanding, and cognitive reasoning that integrates emerging technologies while maintaining professional oversight; (3) addressing trust requirements for high-stakes financial applications including regulatory compliance, algorithmic fairness, and uncertainty quantification; (4) proposing evaluation methodologies beyond generic AI benchmarks toward domain-specific protocols. Our findings indicate successful transformation requires not merely technological sophistication but careful human-AI collaboration, creating systems that augment rather than replace professional expertise while addressing historical biases and information asymmetries in real estate markets.

Advanced bioimaging technologies have enabled the large-scale acquisition of multidimensional data, yet effective metadata management and interoperability remain significant challenges. To address these issues, we propose a new ontology-driven framework for the Systems Science of Biological Dynamics Database (SSBD) that adopts a two-tier architecture. The core layer provides a class-centric structure referencing existing biomedical ontologies, supporting both SSBD:repository -- which focuses on rapid dataset publication with minimal metadata -- and SSBD:database, which is enhanced with biological and imaging-related annotations. Meanwhile, the instance layer represents actual imaging dataset information as Resource Description Framework individuals that are explicitly linked to the core classes. This layered approach aligns flexible instance data with robust ontological classes, enabling seamless integration and advanced semantic queries. By coupling flexibility with rigor, the SSBD Ontology promotes interoperability, data reuse, and the discovery of novel biological mechanisms. Moreover, our solution aligns with the Recommended Metadata for Biological Images guidelines and fosters compatibility. Ultimately, our approach contributes to establishing a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data ecosystem within the bioimaging community.

We establish a correspondence between (fragments of) $\mathcal{TEL}^\bigcirc$, a temporal extension of the $\mathcal{EL}$ description logic with the LTL operator $\bigcirc^k$, and some specific kinds of formal grammars, in particular, conjunctive grammars (context-free grammars equipped with the operation of intersection). This connection implies that $\mathcal{TEL}^\bigcirc$ does not possess the property of ultimate periodicity of models, and further leads to undecidability of query answering in $\mathcal{TEL}^\bigcirc$, closing a question left open since the introduction of $\mathcal{TEL}^\bigcirc$. Moreover, it also allows to establish decidability of query answering for some new interesting fragments of $\mathcal{TEL}^\bigcirc$, and to reuse for this purpose existing tools and algorithms for conjunctive grammars.