This Thursday 2nd of April at 15:00 hrs we will have a talk in our seminar’s sessions. This time, Szymon Klarman will talk about “From one- to multi-dimensional Description Logics: capturing comparison class-relativity of concept interpretations” (abstract follows; draft available). After the talk, further discussions about the topic and other dynamic business can take place with some drinks!
The meeting will take place in room 3.27 of the P building (Euclides).
Abstract
Description Logic (DL) is a family of knowledge representation formalisms with a rapidly growing number of practical applications varying from Semantic Web to medical knowledge systems, to legal expert systems. Formally DL is a subset of first-order logic and, in the case of its basic ALC language, also a notational variant of the multimodal logic K. In its one-dimensional core it offers a toolkit of expressive means perfectly suited for representing terminological and assertional knowledge about a domain under consideration, under an implicit proviso, that such knowledge is static, definite and unambiguous. Alas, many recent applications have to go beyond that, requiring formal mechanisms for handling uncertainty, vagueness, context-sensitivity, and many other similar phenomena inherent to real-world knowledge. One way of extending the expressive power of the DL framework in the desired direction leads through introducing additional modal dimensions into the logics. In this talk I will discuss a part of ongoing work aimed at employing this strategy in order to capture comparison class-relativity of concept interpretations (i.e. a type of context-sensitivity) as encountered, for instance, in the natural use of predicates tall, short, big, small, etc. (e.g.: London is the biggest city in Europe, but it is not the biggest city in the world).