Engineering Background Knowledge For Social Robots

Engineering Background Knowledge for Social Robots

Social robots are embodied agents that perform knowledge-intensive tasks involving several kinds of information from different heterogeneous sources. This book, Engineering Background Knowledge for Social Robots, introduces a component-based architecture for supporting the knowledge-intensive tasks performed by social robots. The design was based on the requirements of a real socially-assistive robotic application, and all the components contribute to and benefit from the knowledge base which is its cornerstone. The knowledge base is structured by a set of interconnected and modularized ontologies which model the information, and is initially populated with linguistic, ontological and factual knowledge retrieved from Linked Open Data. Access to the knowledge base is guaranteed by Lizard, a tool providing software components, with an API for accessing facts stored in the knowledge base in a programmatic and object-oriented way. The author introduces two methods for engineering the knowledge needed by robots, a novel method for automatically integrating knowledge from heterogeneous sources with a frame-driven approach, and a novel empirical method for assessing foundational distinctions over Linked Open Data entities from a common-sense perspective. These effectively enable the evolution of the robot’s knowledge by automatically integrating information derived from heterogeneous sources and the generation of common-sense knowledge using Linked Open Data as an empirical basis. The feasibility and benefits of the architecture have been assessed through a prototype deployed in a real socially-assistive scenario, and the book presents two applications and the results of a qualitative and quantitative evaluation.

Engineering Background Knowledge for Social Robots

Advances in Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering

Ontologies are the corner stone of data modeling and knowledge representation, and engineering an ontology is a complex task in which domain knowledge, ontological accuracy and computational properties need to be carefully balanced. As with any engineering task, the identification and documentation of common patterns is important, and Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) provide ontology designers with a strong connection to requirements and a better communication of their semantic content and intent. This book, Advances in Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering, contains 23 extended versions of selected papers presented at the annual Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP) between 2017 and 2020. This yearly event, which attracts a large number of researchers and professionals in the field of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, covers issues related to quality aspects of ontology engineering and ODPs for data and knowledge representation, and is usually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), apart from WOP 2020, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics covered by the papers collected here focus on recent advances in ontology design and patterns, and range from a method to instantiate content patterns, through a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations and applications. The book provides an overview of important advances in ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.