SSP Group Meeting

11am, 12 August, 2003
Room 3.04, Appleton Tower
CISA, School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

Information-Flow Centred Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Marco Schorlemmer

This is my Farewell SSP Talk before moving on to take my new position at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, in Barcelona, and I shall explain my 5-year project that I've presented to get awarded with a 'Ramon y Cajal' Research Fellowship:

I shall study the mathematical foundations that underlie the current practices of knowledge engineering as they are performed in large-scale collaborative projects within highly distributed environments. In particular, I shall be concerned in investigating how current theories of information and information flow may provide a ground for foundational, methodological and technical advances in knowledge representation and reasoning.

I propose to do foundational research on the nature of information and information flow by building upon current proposals for a science of information. This is to devise improved methodologies for knowledge representation and reasoning, and hence to provide better computational support to the task of knowledge engineering. I am particularly interested in the changing engineering practices, due to generalised used of highly heterogeneous and dynamic environments like the World Wide Web, and in developing improved formal methods that support these engineering practices.

I suggest to do this foundational research centred on an information-flow perspective, based on notions and constructs from category theory and categorical logic. This is so because such an approach has proved to be very valuable in many approaches to information. In my own research I have explored such information-flow centred perspective as well, and thus I am convinced that such foundational approach will provide new insights in both the nature of logical representation and reasoning and in mathematically rigorous methods and techniques for formal knowledge engineering.