Description Logics (DL) form a family of Logic-based Knowledge Representation Languages which allow for modeling an application domain in terms of objects, concepts and relationships between concepts, and for reasoning about them. They are widely used in several areas, including ontology engineering, Semantic Web, and information integration. The research at DIAG on DL has a long tradition, and focuses on many relevant aspects, including algorithms for automated reasoning, trade-off between expressive power and computational complexity of reasoning, query answering in DL knowledge bases, adding both monotonic and non-monotonic rules to DL. In the future, the work on DL will both continue along the above mentioned lines and focus on dynamic aspects, such as update and revision of DL knowledge bases, and reasoning about programs expressed on such knowledge bases.
The Semantic Technologies aim at intelligent information processing by creating and connecting machine-understandable information, sometimes called the Semantic Web. Our research in this area mainly focuses on representation languages, in particular for ontologies. A remarkable outcome of our research in this area is the standardization of the OWL 2 QL ontology specification language by the World Wide Web Consortium. OWL 2 QL directly derives from DL-Lite, a family of ontology formalisms which we proposed and studied in our recent research in this field.
Reasoning about Actions concerns the theory and the implementation of agents that reason, act and perceive in changing, incompletely known, and unpredictable environments. Such agents must have higher level cognitive functions that involve reasoning, for example, about goals, actions, when to perceive and what to look for, the cognitive states of other agents, time, collaborative task execution, etc. Our research on Reasoning about Actions focuses on several aspects, including: foundations of theory of actions; various forms of planning or automated process synthesis for sophisticated dynamic properties, e.g., expressed in mu-calculus, ATL, LTL, LTLf, and LDLf; high-level agent programs, like ConGolog based on the Situation Calculus; agent behavior synthesis and composition. This research is also related with, and applied to, other areas, such as cognitive robotics, multi-agent/multi-robot systems, software service modeling, execution and composition, high-level programs and business processes over ontologies and data sources.
One specific application where knowledge representation has been applied is Spoken Language Understanding in the context of Robotics. Specifically, we have addressed the interpretation of spoken commands and the extension to handle more complex forms of dialog. The knowledge about the environment and the robot capabilities are used by the system in order to build the language that specifies robot commands. Moreover, the knowledge about the environment (semantic map), can be used to bias the interpretation of commands through a spoken language command interpretation chain that is based on statistical off-the-shelf tools.
Finally, the group also investigates the synergistic integration of Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Representation.
Several group members are recipients of prestigious awards, are regularly involved in editorial activities of the scientific community, and are invited to deliver keynote talks at international conferences or workshops.
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