LiveJournal is a social network journal service with focus on user interactions. As for many other online social networks, predicting potential friendships in the LiveJournal network is a problem of great practical interest. Previous work has shown that graph features extracted from the graph associated with the network are good predictors for friendship links. However, contrary to the intuition, user data (e.g., interests shared by two users) does not always improve the predictions obtained with graph features alone. This could be due to the fact that features constructed from a large number of user declared interests cannot capture the implicit semantic of the interests. To test this hypothesis, we use a clustering approach to build an interest ontology, and explore the ability of the ontology to improve the performance of learning algorithms at predicting friendship links, when interest-based features are used alone or in combination with graph-based features. The results show that ontology-based features can help improve the performance of several machine learning classifiers (in particular, random forest classifiers) at the task of predicting links in the LiveJournal social network.

In this paper, we investigate knowledge reasoning within a simple framework called knowledge structure. We use variable forgetting as a basic operation for one agent to reason about its own or other agents\' knowledge. In our framework, two notions namely agents\' observable variables and the weakest sufficient condition play important roles in knowledge reasoning. Given a background knowledge base and a set of observable variables for each agent, we show that the notion of an agent knowing a formula can be defined as a weakest sufficient condition of the formula under background knowledge base. Moreover, we show how to capture the notion of common knowledge by using a generalized notion of weakest sufficient condition. Also, we show that public announcement operator can be conveniently dealt with via our notion of knowledge structure. Further, we explore the computational complexity of the problem whether an epistemic formula is realized in a knowledge structure. In the general case, this problem is PSPACE-hard; however, for some interesting subcases, it can be reduced to co-NP. Finally, we discuss possible applications of our framework in some interesting domains such as the automated analysis of the well-known muddy children puzzle and the verification of the revised Needham-Schroeder protocol. We believe that there are many scenarios where the natural presentation of the available information about knowledge is under the form of a knowledge structure. What makes it valuable compared with the corresponding multi-agent S5 Kripke structure is that it can be much more succinct.

In this paper, we propose a first-order ontology for generalized stratified order structure. We then classify the models of the theory using model-theoretic techniques. An ontology mapping from this ontology to the core theory of Process Specification Language is also discussed.

In this paper, we present a prototype application — the Technology Trend Tracker — to measure the reality of technology trends of interest using information on the Web to inform decisions such as when to develop training, when to invest in expertise, and more. This prototype performs this task by integrating several artificial intelligence technologies in an innovative way. These technologies include rich semantic representations, a natural language understanding module, and a flexible semantic matcher. We use our system to augment Accenture's annual technology vision survey and show how our system performs well on measuring the reality of technology trends from this survey. We also show why our system performs well through an ablation study.

This paper 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, multi-university, 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 paper 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 3,500   students since 2006.

As the volume and interconnectedness of corporate data grows, data quality is becoming a business competency essential to success. Existing methods for managing data quality do not scale up to large volumes of data in a way that is directly manageable by the owner of the data. For the past two years a new breed of data quality products, built on applied AI techniques, are empowering non-technical users. Over 150 businesses are benefiting from these products including NASDAQ, Visa, Experian, Oracle, Fidelity, Bank of America, Volvo, Dell, Sabic, and Dassault Systems. The applied AI techniques described include lightweight ontologies to efficiently find inexact textual matches in large data sets.

The motivation of semantic wikis is to make acquisition, maintenance, and mining of formal knowledge simpler, faster, and more flexible. However, most existing semantic wikis have a very technical interface and are restricted to a relatively low level of expressivity. In this paper, we explain how AceWiki uses controlled English -- concretely Attempto Controlled English (ACE) -- to provide a natural and intuitive interface while supporting a high degree of expressivity. We introduce recent improvements of the AceWiki system and user studies that indicate that AceWiki is usable and useful.

A folksonomy refers to a collection of user-defined tags with which users describe contents published  on the Web. With the flourish of Web 2.0, folksonomies have become an important mean to develop the Semantic Web. Because tags in folksonomies are authored freely, there is a need to understand the structure and semantics of these tags in various applications. In this paper, we propose a learning approach to create an ontology that captures the hierarchical semantic structure of folksonomies. Our experimental results on two different genres of real world data sets show that our method can effectively learn the ontology structure from the folksonomies.

Conjunctive queries (CQ) are fundamental for accessing description logic (DL) knowledge bases. We study CQ answering in (extensions of) the DL EL, which is popular for large-scale ontologies and underlies the designated OWL2-EL profile of OWL2. Our main contribution is a novel approach to CQ answering that enables the use of standard relational database systems as the basis for query execution. We evaluate our approach using the IBM DB2 system, with encouraging results.

We present a novel reasoning procedure for Horn SHIQ ontologies—SHIQ ontologies that can be translated to the Horn fragment of first-order logic. In contrast to traditional reasoning procedures for ontologies, our procedure does not build models or model representations, but works by deriving new consequent axioms. The procedure is closely related to the so-called completion-based procedure for EL++ ontologies, and can be regarded as an extension thereof. In fact, our procedure is theoretically optimal for Horn SHIQ ontologies as well as for the common fragment of EL++ and SHIQ. A preliminary empirical evaluation of our procedure on large medical ontologies demonstrates a dramatic improvement over existing ontology reasoners. Specifically, our implementation allows the classification of the largest available OWL version of Galen. To the best of our knowledge no other reasoner is able to classify this ontology.