Tag Archives: Cyc

Inference in Ontopedia

I just finished reading “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Modeling in RDF, RDFS and OWL”. Great book! Lots of examples and deep exploration of Semantic Web fundamentals. It inspired me… not to use OWL, no… but to describe how we approach inference/reasoning in Ontopedia.

There are several fundamental principles that we try to follow developing inference capabilities in Ontopedia.

Paraconsistency

We assume that Ontopedia’s knowledge base can have contradictions at any time. We try to develop a system that can do “reasonable” inferences within inconsistent knowledge base.

Non-monotonic, Adaptive Knowledge Base

People change opinions, modify existing and create new theories (formal and informal). People learn new things, they can be convinced and taught (sometimes). There is evolution in general and personal knowledge. We would like to support these “subject-centric” features.

In simple cases, Ontopedia users can change their factual assertions. This can trigger truth maintenance processes and revision of other assertions. Ontopedia also keeps history of assertions – “Who asserted What and When”

Minimization of Inconsistency

We try to create a system that can operate/reason within inconsistent knowledge base. But it is not enough. We embed mechanisms that allow to identify inconsistencies and help to resolve them. Knowledge conflicts are “first class objects” in Ontopedia and are organized based on conflict types. Each knowledge conflict type has conditions that describe how conflicts of this type can be identified. There are also some recommendations for resolving conflicts. In general, Ontopedia’s user community tries to minimize knowledge inconsistency and Ontopedia system “tries” to help users to achieve this goal.

Inference Transparency and Information Provenance

Inference is not an easy process, contradictions are tough, knowledge evolution is challenging. We do not try to create an illusion that these things are easy and that a user can just “click a button” and magically get “all” inferred assertions, we do not try to “virtualize” inference and hide it behind a query language, for example. We think about inference as a process that can be time and resource consuming and can include multiple steps. Ontopedia provides facilities to record various steps of inference process. Inference tracing is an important part of Information Provenance in Ontopedia. We keep track of “Who asserted What and When” and we also keep track of “What was Inferred based on What and Why”.

Multiple Inference Modules and Decision Procedure

RDFS inference rules are useful, RDFS+ adds some new tricks. OWL 1.0 inference looks interesting in many contexts and OWL 2.0 looks even better. What about Common Logic? What about Cyc-like inference?… Ontopedia’s system architecture supports various inference modules. Each module can generate proposals based on the current state of Ontopedia’s knowledge base. These proposals are recorded in the knowledge base but they do not automatically become Ontopedia’s “visible” assertions. Different inference modules can produce controversial proposals, it’s OK. Various proposals are considered by Ontopedia’s decision procedure that calculates “final” assertion that becomes “visible” on Ontopedia’s web site. Decision procedure can be invoked on any assertion at any time. Ontopedia’s knowledge base is not limited by “true” only statements. We utilize multi-valued truth including “unknown.”

Loosely Coupled Inference, Decision Making, and Truth Maintenance

Ontopedia is a system that can “infer a little bit something here”, “find some knowledge conflicts there”, “make some new decisions”, “infer a little bit more”, “review some decisions” etc. All these activities can be performed in any order by various components.
All activities are recorded in the “activity log” (it is available as RSS/ATOM feed). Various modules can explore activity log and use it for managing own activities and cooperation between modules. In general, modules can run in parallel in various areas of Ontopedia’s knowledge base. These activities can be directed buy user community through user interface or can be directed by “controller” software components.

I developed this approach and related system architecture in late 80s and used it successfully in various projects for relatively small data sets during last 20 years. What is exciting about 2010? It’s availability of huge data sets on the Web. There is also experience in building Social Web and much better understanding of Collective Intelligence. I could only envision in 1990 that it would be possible to build large stable evolving paraconsistent open knowledge based systems. In 2010, I am pretty sure about this.

Paraconsistent Reasoning in Ontopedia

I did a short presentation about paraconsistent reasoning in Ontopedia on TMRA 2009.

Summary:

  • Paraconsistent reasoning allows to collect assertions from
    various sources and “safely” infer new information
  • Paraconsistent reasoning works well together with constraint
    languages (such as TMCL)
  • Paraconsistent reasoning supports evolutionary approach to
    building large assertion systems
  • We do not need to “fix all errors” before we can reason

2008 Semantic Technology Conference: random observations

I am back from Semantic Technology Conference. It is becoming bigger and bigger each year. This year there were more than hundred sessions, full day of tutorials, product exhibition. It was quite crowded and energizing.

Just some random observations:

Oracle improves RDF / OWL support in 11g database, considers RDF/OWL as strategic/enabling technologies which will be leveraged in future versions of Oracle products.

Yahoo uses RDF to organize content on various web sites. It also introduced SearchMonkey – extension to Yahoo search platform which allows to provide more detailed information about information resources.

– Consumer oriented web sites powered by semantic technologies are here. Twine, Freebase, Powerset are good examples, more to come.

Resource Oriented Architecture and RDF could be a very powerful combination. More and more people understand the value of exposing data through URIs in the form of information resources.
Linked Data initiative looks quite interesting.

– Some advanced semantic applications use knowledge representation formalisms that go beyond basic RDF/OWL model.
But RDF/OWL can be used to surface/exchange information based on W3C standards. Lots of discussions about
information provenance, trust, “semantic spam”.

– It looks like there is a workable solution (compromise) for ’Web’s Identity Crisis’. The idea is to reserve HTTP 303 (“See Other”) code for indication of “Concept URIs”. 303 response should include an additional URI for “See Other” information resource. This approach combined
with new PURL -like servers allows to keep RDF “as is” and to implement something close to the idea of Published Subject Identifiers

Franz demonstrated a new version of AllegroGraph 64-bit RDFStore. Franz implemented support for Named Graphs (can be used for representing weights, trust factors, provenance)
and incorporated geospatial and temporal libraries. Named Graphs allow to deal with contexts using RDF.

– Text analysis tools become better and better. Interesting example is AllegroGraph.
Incorporating natural language processors allows to extract entities and relationships with reasonable level of precision (News Portal sample).

Doug Lenat did a great presentation on the conference about the history of Cyc project. It looks like in 5-10 years we can expect “artificial intelligent assistants” with quite sophisticated abilities to reason.