Seminar — Steven Kraines

Leveraging recent developments in semantic web technologies and artificial intelligence, particularly web-based ontologies and logical inference reasoners, the EKOSS (Expert Knowledge Ontology-based Semantic Search) platform has been developed and deployed on the Web. EKOSS focuses on providing knowledge creators with intuitive and easily accessible tools for creating computer interpretable semantic statements that describe their expert knowledge based on ontologies. EKOSS also provides a set of tools for helping users search and mine the semantic statements through semantic matching and do other reasoning tasks based on the RacerPro description logics reasoner. Using EKOSS, it is hoped that repositories of semantic statements that are authored by the knowledge experts themselves but that can also be interpreted "intelligently" by computer reasoning algorithms can be realized. Initiatives to "get the ball rolling" by constructing knowledge repositories in the areas of sustainability and energy science, life sciences, and engineering failure knowledge together with preliminary analysis results of the semantic statements that have been created to date will be presented. I hope that there will be opportunity and interest for discussion of the ontologies that have been constructed for the EKOSS system, particularly in the domain of life sciences.