Supervisor

Suitable for

Abstract

Background:

The next revolution in Web search as one of the key technologies of the Web has just started with the incorporation of ideas from the Semantic Web, aiming at transforming current Web search into some form of semantic search and query answering. Next-generation technologies for semantic search and query answering on the Web can be realized via knowledge bases extracted from the Web relative to an underlying ontology. The realization of such knowledge bases requires a principled and sensible way of managing conflicting information. Though inconsistency has been addressed for many years now in artificial intelligence and database theory, the search for flexible and computationally efficient inconsistency-tolerant semantics is a very active research topic.

Potential Projects:

● Characterization of inconsistency and repairing for different fragments of the Datalog+/-family of ontology languages.

● Study of desirable properties of repairs and development of adequate preference relations among repairs.

● Development of alternative inconsistency-tolerant semantics for query answering in different fragments of Datalog+/-: analysis of the trade-off between quality of answers and computation cost.

● Argumentation is one of the most well-known and capable systems for inconsistency management. The study of argumentation aspects and frameworks for different fragments of the Datalog+/- family of ontology languages as part of the above points.

● Implementation of repairing and inconsistency-tolerant query answering techniques on fragments and extensions of Datalog+/-.

Prerequisites:

Participation in all aspects of the project require good analytical skills and background in knowledge representation and reasoning (in particular, first-order logic and logic programming). For the theoretical aspects, background in computational complexity and database theory would be ideal. The practical (implementation-oriented) parts require software engineering skills, knowledge of web programming to develop web interfaces, as well as good knowledge of Java and Eclipse.

Supervision:

The projects will be supervised by Thomas Lukasiewicz.