Ontologies are entering widespread use in many areas such as knowledge and content management, electronic commerce and the Semantic Web. In this paper we show how the use of ontologies has helped us overcome some important problems in the development of pervasive computing environments. We have integrated ontologies and Semantic Web technology into our pervasive computing infrastructure. Our investigations have shown that Semantic Web technology can be integrated into our CORBA-based infrastructure to augment several important services. This work suggests a number of requirements for future research in the development of ontologies, reasoners, languages and interfaces.

In this survey, we review different text mining techniques to discover various textual patterns from the social networking sites. Social network applications create opportunities to establish interaction among people leading to mutual learning and sharing of valuable knowledge, such as chat, comments, and discussion boards. Data in social networking websites is inherently unstructured and fuzzy in nature. In everyday life conversations, people do not care about the spellings and accurate grammatical construction of a sentence that may lead to different types of ambiguities, such as lexical, syntactic, and semantic. Therefore, analyzing and extracting information patterns from such data sets are more complex. Several surveys have been conducted to analyze different methods for the information extraction. Most of the surveys emphasized on the application of different text mining techniques for unstructured data sets reside in the form of text documents, but do not specifically target the data sets in social networking website. This survey attempts to provide a thorough understanding of different text mining techniques as well as the application of these techniques in the social networking websites. This survey investigates the recent advancement in the field of text analysis and covers two basic approaches of text mining, such as classification and clustering that are widely used for the exploration of the unstructured text available on the Web.

Context-aware pervasive systems are emerging as an important class of applications. Such systems can respond intelligently to contextual information about the physical world acquired via sensors and information about the computational environment. A declarative approach to building context-aware pervasive systems is presented, and the notion of the situation program is introduced, which highlights the primacy of the situation abstraction for building context-aware pervasive systems. There is also a demonstration of how to manipulate situation programs using meta-programming within an extension of the Prolog logic programming language which is called LogicCAP. Such meta-reasoning enables complex situations to be described in terms of other situations. Furthermore, a discussion is given on how the design of situation programs can affect the properties of a context-aware system. The approach encourages a high-level of abstraction for representing and reasoning with situations, and supports building context-aware systems incrementally by providing modularity and separation of concerns.

A case in case-based reasoning is a contextualized piece of experience, which can be represented in various forms. Traditional approaches can be classified into three main categories: feature vector representations, structured representations, and textual representations. More sophisticated approaches make use of hierarchical representations or generalized cases. For particular tasks such as design and planning highly specific representations have been developed.

In recent years, multi-agent systems (MASs) have received increasing attention in the artificial intelligence community. Research in multi-agent systems involves the investigation of autonomous, rational and flexible behaviour of entities such as software programs or robots, and their interaction and coordination in such diverse areas as robotics (Kitano et al., 1997), information retrieval and management (Klusch, 1999), and simulation (Gilbert & Conte, 1995). When designing agent systems, it is impossible to foresee all the potential situations an agent may encounter and specify an agent behaviour optimally in advance. Agents therefore have to learn from, and adapt to, their environment, especially in a multi-agent setting.

This commentary provides a definition of textual case-based reasoning (TCBR) and surveys research contributions according to four research questions. We also describe how TCBR can be distinguished from text mining and information retrieval. We conclude with potential directions for TCBR research.

In this paper we survey the basics of reinforcement learning and (evolutionary) game theory, applied to the field of multi-agent systems. This paper contains three parts. We start with an overview on the fundamentals of reinforcement learning. Next we summarize the most important aspects of evolutionary game theory. Finally, we discuss the state-of-the-art of multi-agent reinforcement learning and the mathematical connection with evolutionary game theory.

The level of abstraction of much of the work in knowledge-based systems (the rule, frame, logic level) is too low to provide a rich enough vocabulary for knowledge and control. I provide an overview of a framework called the Generic Task approach that proposes that knowledge systems should be built out of building blocks, each of which is appropriate for a basic type of problem solving. Each generic task uses forms of knowledge and control strategies that are characteristic to it, and are in general conceptually closer to domain knowledge. This facilitates knowledge acquisition and can produce a more perspicuous explanation of problem solving. The relationship of the constructs at the generic task level to the rule-frame level is analogous to that between high-level programming languages and assembly languages in computer science. I describe a set of generic tasks that have been found particularly useful in constructing diagnostic, design and planning systems. In particular, I describe two tools, CSRL and DSPL, that are useful for building classification-based diagnostic systems and skeletal planning systems respectively, and a high level toolbox that is under construction called the Generic Task toolbox.

Argumentation and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) are closely related, as in the recent years, Argumentation has been used for providing Explainability to AI. Argumentation can show step by step how an AI System reaches a decision; it can provide reasoning over uncertainty and can find solutions when conflicting information is faced. In this survey, we elaborate over the topics of Argumentation and XAI combined, by reviewing all the important methods and studies, as well as implementations that use Argumentation to provide Explainability in AI. More specifically, we show how Argumentation can enable Explainability for solving various types of problems in decision-making, justification of an opinion, and dialogues. Subsequently, we elaborate on how Argumentation can help in constructing explainable systems in various applications domains, such as in Medical Informatics, Law, the Semantic Web, Security, Robotics, and some general purpose systems. Finally, we present approaches that combine Machine Learning and Argumentation Theory, toward more interpretable predictive models.

Representation and reasoning with qualitative spatial relations is an important problem in artificial intelligence and has wide applications in the fields of geographic information system, computer vision, autonomous robot navigation, natural language understanding, spatial databases and so on. The reasons for this interest in using qualitative spatial relations include cognitive comprehensibility, efficiency and computational facility. This paper summarizes progress in qualitative spatial representation by describing key calculi representing different types of spatial relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of current research and glimpse of future work.

Within the next decades, robots will need to be able to execute a large variety of tasks autonomously in a large variety of environments. To relax the resulting programming effort, a knowledge-enabled approach to robot programming can be adopted to organize information in re-usable knowledge pieces. However, for the ease of reuse, there needs to be an agreement on the meaning of terms. A common approach is to represent these terms using ontology languages that conceptualize the respective domain. In this work, we will review projects that use ontologies to support robot autonomy. We will systematically search for projects that fulfill a set of inclusion criteria and compare them with each other with respect to the scope of their ontology, what types of cognitive capabilities are supported by the use of ontologies, and which is their application domain.

This article presents a comprehensive overview of methods and techniques used for the evaluation of user-adaptive systems. It describes the methodologies derived both from the evaluation of human–computer interaction systems and from information retrieval and information filtering systems by giving examples of the application of these methodologies in the user-adaptive systems. The state of the art and the main results in the evaluation of these systems are reported. In particular, empirical evaluation and layered approaches are discussed in detail. Finally, focus on less explored methodologies, such as qualitative approaches (e.g. Grounded Theory), is proposed.

Personal information agents have emerged in the last decade to help users to cope with the increasing amount of information available on the Internet. These agents are intelligent assistants that perform several information-related tasks such as finding, filtering and monitoring relevant information on behalf of users or communities of users. In order to provide personalized assistance, personal agents rely on representations of user information interests and preferences contained in user profiles. In this paper, we present a summary of the state-of-the-art in user profiling in the context of intelligent information agents. Existing approaches and lines of research in the main dimensions of user profiling, such as acquisition, learning, adaptation and evaluation, are discussed.

The aim of this paper is to give a survey on the development and applications of evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS). The paper starts with a general introduction describing the background, structure and behaviour of EMAS. EMAS application to solving global optimisation problems is presented in the next section along with its modification targeted at lowering the computation costs by early removing certain agents based on immunological inspirations. Subsequent sections deal with the elitist variant of EMAS aimed at solving multi-criteria optimisation problems, and the co-evolutionary one aimed at solving multi-modal optimisation problems. Each variation of EMAS is illustrated with selected experimental results.

In systems composed of multiple autonomous agents, negotiation is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive at a mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan, for example. Particularly because the agents are autonomous and cannot be assumed to be benevolent, agents must influence others to convince them to act in certain ways, and negotiation is thus critical for managing such inter-agent dependencies. The process of negotiation may be of many different forms, such as auctions, protocols in the style of the contract net, and argumentation, but it is unclear just how sophisticated the agents or the protocols for interaction must be for successful negotiation in different contexts. All these issues were raised in the panel session on negotiation.

The current fourth industrial revolution, or ‘Industry 4.0’ (I4.0), is driven by digital data, connectivity, and cyber systems, and it has the potential to create impressive/new business opportunities. With the arrival of I4.0, the scenario of various intelligent systems interacting reliably and securely with each other becomes a reality which technical systems need to address. One major aspect of I4.0 is to adopt a coherent approach for the semantic communication in between multiple intelligent systems, which include human and artificial (software or hardware) agents. For this purpose, ontologies can provide the solution by formalizing the smart manufacturing knowledge in an interoperable way. Hence, this paper presents the few existing ontologies for I4.0, along with the current state of the standardization effort in the factory 4.0 domain and examples of real-world scenarios for I4.0.

The blockchain is an emerging technology which has the potential to improve many information systems. In this regard, the applications and the platform they are built on must be able to connect and communicate with each other. However, the current blockchain platforms have several limitations, such as lack of interoperability among different systems. The existing platforms of blockchain applications operate only within their own networks. Even though the underlying technology is similar, it relies on centralized third-party mediators to exchange or retrieve information from other blockchain networks. The current third-party intermediaries establish trust and security by preserving a centralized ledger to track ‘account balances’ and vouch for a transaction’s authenticity. The inability for independent blockchains to communicate with one another is an inherent problem in the decentralized systems. Lack of appropriate inter-blockchain communication puts a strain on the mainstream adoption of blockchain. It is evident that blockchain technology has the potential to become a suitable solution for some systems if it can scale and is able to cross communicate with other systems. For the multisystem blockchain concept to become a reality, a mechanism is required that would connect and communicate with multiple entities’ blockchain systems in a distributed fashion (without any intermediary), while maintaining the property of trust and integrity built by individual blockchains. In this article, we propose a mechanism that provides cross-chain interoperability using transactions.

In this paper, we present a survey of the development of the technique of argument diagramming covering not only the fields in which it originated — informal logic, argumentation theory, evidence law and legal reasoning — but also more recent work in applying and developing it in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI). Beginning with a simple example of an everyday argument, we present an analysis of it visualized as an argument diagram constructed using a software tool. In the context of a brief history of the development of diagramming, it is then shown how argument diagrams have been used to analyse and work with argumentation in law, philosophy and AI.

Various ontology visualization tools using different visualization methods exist and new ones are being developed every year. The goal of this paper is to follow up on previous surveys with an updated classification of ontology visualization methods and a comprehensive survey of available tools. The tools are analyzed for the used visualization methods, interaction techniques and supported ontology constructs. It shows that most of the tools apply two-dimensional node-link visualizations with a focus on class hierarchies. Color and shape are used with little variation, support for constructs introduced with version 2 of the OWL Web Ontology Language is limited, and it often remains vague what tasks and use cases are supported by the visualizations. Major challenges are the limited maturity and usability of many of the tools as well as providing an overview of large ontologies while also showing details on demand. We see a high demand for a universal ontology visualization framework implementing a core set of visual and interactive features that can be extended and customized to respective use cases.

This paper reviews the current state of the art in natural language access to databases. This has been a long-standing area of work in natural language processing. But though some commercial systems are now available, providing front ends has proved much harder than was expected, and the necessary limitations on front ends have to be recognized. The paper discusses the issues, both general to language and task-specific, involved in front end design, and the way these have been addressed, concentrating on the work of the last decade. The focus is on the central process of translating a natural language question into a database query, but other supporting functions are also covered. The points are illustrated by the use of a single example application. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the current state, indicating that future progress will depend on the one hand on general advances in natural language processing, and on the other on expanding the capabilities of traditional databases.