There are many significant research projects focused on providing semantic web repositories that are scalable and efficient. However, the true value of the semantic web architecture is its ability to represent meaningful knowledge and not just data. Therefore, a semantic web knowledge base should do more than retrieve collections of triples. We propose RDFKB (Resource Description Knowledge Base), a complete semantic web knowledge case. RDFKB is a solution for managing, persisting and querying semantic web knowledge. Our experiments with real world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that RDFKB achieves superior query performance to other state-of-the-art solutions. The key features of RDFKB that differentiate it from other solutions are: 1) a simple and efficient process for data additions, deletions and updates that does not involve reprocessing the dataset; 2) materialization of inferred triples at addition time without performance degradation; 3) materialization of uncertain information and support for queries involving probabilities; 4) distributed inference across datasets; 5) ability to apply alignments to the dataset and perform queries against multiple sources using alignment. RDFKB allows more knowledge to be stored and retrieved; it is a repository not just for RDF datasets, but also for inferred triples, probability information, and lineage information. RDFKB provides a complete and efficient RDF data repository and knowledge base.

The problem of grasping is widely studied in the The problem of semantic part decomposition is still an robotics community. This project focuses on the open problem and, to the best of our knowledge, there are identification of object graspable features using images no tools available to automatically create a fuzzy ontology and object structural information. The primary from raw data taken from an image. The use of fuzzy DLs for aim is the creation of a framework in which the information object recognition has been investigated in some works such gathered by the vision system can be integrated as [Hudelot et al., 2008], in which little advantage is taken with automatically generated knowledge, from the (partial) fuzzy extension and from the expressivity modelled by means of fuzzy description logics. of the used logic (i.e., no cardinality restrictions are used); furthermore, a preliminary phase of semantic annotation of the images by domain experts has to be performed.

The growing number of statistical topic models led to the need to better evaluate their output. Traditional evaluation means estimate the model’s fitness to unseen data. It has recently been proven than the output of human judgment can greatly differ from these measures. Thus the need for methods that better emulate human judgment is stringent. In this paper we present a system that computes the usefulness of individual topics from a given model on the basis of information drawn from a given ontology, in this case WordNet. The notion of utility is regarded as the ability to attribute a concept to each topic and separate words related to the topic from the unrelated ones based on that concept. In multiple experiments we prove the correlation between the automatic evaluation method and the answers received from human evaluators, for various corpora and difficulty levels. By changing the evaluation focus from a statistical one to a conceptual one we were able to detect which topics are conceptually meaningful and rank them accordingly.

The automata-based approach is based on translating a knowledge base (KB) whose satisfiability is to be checked In this work we describe the theoretical foundations into some variant of automata on infinite trees that accepts and the implementation of a new automata-based tree-shaped models of the KB, and checking such an automaton technique for reasoning over expressive Description for non-emptiness. This approach is powerful and flexible. Logics that is worst-case optimal and lends itself It is acknowledged that it provides a very robust basis to an efficient implementation. In order to show for showing worst-case optimal complexity upper bounds, the feasibility of the approach, we have realized a and has been applied for a wide range of expressive DLs working prototype of a reasoner based upon these and reasoning services (cf.

In AI, this area Ontologies that evolve through use to support new has been studied under a variety of names such as forgetting domain tasks can grow extremely large. Moreover, and variable elimination [Eiter et al., 2006; Wang et al., large ontologies require more resources to use and 2008]. We provide a general approach for ranking knowledge have slower response times than small ones. To according to its use and cost, which can be applied to systems help address this problem, we present an online semantic that are limited by memory resources to evaluate memory forgetting algorithm that removes ontology allocation. We also provide a specific approach to select fragments containing infrequently used or cheap to which concepts to remove from an ontology, using the ranking.

We study the problem of dealing with inconsistency in Description Logic (DL) ontologies. We consider inconsistency-tolerant semantics recently proposed in the literature, called AR-semantics and CAR-semantics, which are based on repairing (i.e., modifying) in a minimal way the extensional knowledge (ABox) while keeping the intensional knowledge (TBox) untouched. We study instance checking and conjunctive query entailment under the above inconsistency-tolerant semantics for a wide spectrum of DLs, ranging from tractable ones (EL) to very expressive ones (SHIQ), showing that reasoning under the above semantics is inherently intractable, even for very simple DLs. To the aim of overcoming such a high computational complexity of reasoning, we study sound approximations of the above semantics. Surprisingly, our computational analysis shows that reasoning under the approximated semantics is intractable even for tractable DLs. Finally, we identify suitable language restrictions of such DLs allowing for tractable reasoning under inconsistency-tolerant semantics.

Quality control is an essential task within ontology development projects especially when the knowledge formalization is partially automatized. In this paper, we propose a reasoning-based, interactive approach to support the revision of formalized knowledge. We state consistency criteria for revision states and introduce the notion of revision closure, based on which the revision of ontologies is partially automatized. Additionally, we propose a notion of axiom impact which is used to determine a beneficial order of axiom evaluation in order to further increase the effectiveness of ontology revision. Finally, we develop the notion of decision spaces, which are structures for calculating and updating the revision closure and axiom impact. The use of decision spaces saves on average 75% of the costly reasoning operations during a revision.

The use of ontologies for accessing data is one of the most exciting new applications of description logic in databases and other information systems. A realistic way of realising sufficiently scalable ontology- based data access in practice is by reduction to querying relational databases. In this paper, we describe the ‘combined approach,’ which incorporates the information given by the ontology into the data and employs query rewriting to eliminate spurious answers. We illustrate this approach for ontologies given in the DL-Lite family of description logics and briefly discuss the results obtained for the EL family.

Log-linear description logics are a family of probabilistic logics integrating various concepts and methods from the areas of knowledge representation and reasoning and statistical relational AI. We define the syntax and semantics of log-linear description logics, describe a convenient representation as sets of first-order formulas, and discuss computational and algorithmic aspects of probabilistic queries in the language. The paper concludes with an experimental evaluation of an implementation of a log-linear DL reasoner.

For my thesis work I am developing a method for evaluating and standardizing ontologies based on an integration of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and OntoClean. BFO serves as the upper ontology for the domain ontologies of the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry. The OBO Foundry initiative is a collaborative effort for developing interoperable, science-based ontologies. OntoClean is an approach for the quality assurance of ontologies, and helps a modeler detect when the subsumption relation is used improperly. Ontologies developed for OBO use include some that have been ratified, and others holding the status of “candidate”. To maintain consistency between ontologies, it is important to establish formal principled criteria that a candidate ontology must meet for ratification. The formalisms that result from our integration will serve as criteria an OBO Foundry candidate ontology must satisfy in order to be ratified. The formalisms will also serve as a constraints within a prototype of an ontology editor that interactively asks a modeler questions that helps alleviate constraint violations.