COMP30411: Knowledge Representation
This page contains supporting materials for the module COMP30411 Knowledge Representation given by Bijan Parsia and Sean Bechhofer. Information here is subject to change: check this page regularly for additional information and updates.
Up to date information on the course is available on the School moodle site.
Course Overview
The field of Knowledge Representation (KR) lies at the intersection of (at least) Artificial Intelligence and Information Management. KR is the attempt to provide rich representations of the world and various things in it that supports building programs that are sensitive to the world via these representations. KR has been used to build expert and diagnostic systems, speech recognizers, games, automated planners, etc. and is the foundation of the Semantic Web, an attempt to remake the World Wide Web so that the content is accessible not only to human beings, but to sophisticated artificial agents.
In this course, we will explore various formalisms for knowledge representations primarily focusing on classical first order logic and interesting fragments thereof (primarily, Description Logics). We will look at attempts to represent various parts of commonsense and scientific knowledge, as well as the use of KR for conceptual modeling in information systems. We will pay special attention to knowledge representations found on the Web, and the special challenges involved.
We will also analyze the problems and promises of KR through discussion of some of the seminal articles of the field.
Assessment
Assessment for the course will be 80% examination, 20% exercises and "labs". In addition to the formal lectures, the timetable includes a number of "lab" sessions. Students will be expected to participate in these discussion sessions and present material prepared outside of the timetabled lectures. As a result, attendance for some of the timetabled slots for this module should be considered mandatory.
Timetable and Lecture Notes
The schedule will be shown below. Lecture notes and associated material will be linked when available. Note that this timetable is subject to change, so you should check this page regularly.
Lectures are on Tuesdays at 11:00 and Thurs at 16:00 in LF17 in the Kilburn Building.
| Week | Date | Topic | Resources/Reading | Notes | Lecturer | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 25/9 | Introduction and Administrivia | Course Intro; Intro to KR | SB+BP | ||
| 27/9 | KA to basic taxonomy |
Epistemics material on KA | KA | SB |
||
| 2 | 2/10 | Discussion/Exercise |
Coursework 1 | SB+BP |
||
| 4/10 | From taxonomy to ontology 1 | Moving towards formalization | BP |
|||
| 3 | 9/10 | From taxonomy to ontology 2 | More defining | BP | ||
| 11/10 | What is KR? | What is a Knowledge Representation? |
What is a KR? |
BP | ||
| 4 | 16/10 | FOL I | Propositional Logic | SB |
||
| 18/10 | FOL II | Predicate Logic | SB | |||
| 5 | 23/10 | FOL III |
SB |
|||
| 25/10 |
Common-sense | Some Commonsense |
BP | |||
| 6 | 30/10 & 1/11 | READING WEEK |
||||
| 7 | 6/11 | Tools and Services | Services | SB | ||
| 8/11 | Logic engineering | Logic Engineering | BP | |||
| 8 | 13/11 | Logic Engineering |
Logic Engineering | BP | ||
| 15/11 |
Logic Engineering |
Logic Engineering | BP | |||
| 9 | 20/11 | Logic Engineering |
Logic Engineering | BP |
||
| 22/11 |
Mapping & Alignment | Semantic Interoperability | SB |
|||
| 10 | 27/11 | Ontoclean | OntoClean | SB |
||
| 29/11 |
Discussion |
SB+BP |
||||
| 11 | 4/12 | Explanation & Debugging | Matthew Horridge |
|||
| 6/12 |
OWL WG Guest Lecture |
Nomic Game Demo | KR in the Legal Domain | Rinke Hoekstra | ||
| 12 | 11/12 | Semantic Web |
Semantic Web | SB |
||
| 13/12 |
Wrap up/mince pies | SB+BP | ||||
Reading List
- Ronald Brachman, Hector Levesque Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence
- Jerry Hobbs, Robert Moore (eds) Formal Theories of the Commonsense World, Morgan Kaufmann.
- Ernest Davis Representations of Commonsense Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann.
- Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy.The Language of First Order Logic, CSLI Lecture Notes, 1993
- Baader at. al. The Description Logic Handbook, CUP, 2003.
- Han Reichgelt Knowledge Representation: An AI Perspective, Ablex Publishing, 1991.
Selected papers and technical reports will be distributed during the lectures and suggested readings will be given for particular lectures.