Seminar: Querying Knowledge Spaces

Abstract: Knowledge graphs allow for the storing of factual and terminological knowledge and are nowadays used in industry to act as an integration layer over different databases. Thereby, knowledge graphs are often seen as centrally administered resources, which, however, incurs all the drawbacks that data engineering has experienced with the management of large information spaces. Inkling to the notion of data spaces, we think of knowledge spaces as graphs that are related by views and/or transformation operations. In addition to all the issues that arise in distributed databases, such distributed knowledge spaces require the querying of terminological knowledge and the handling of conflicting beliefs. In this talk, I’ll present our approaches to reasoning on shape constraints that impose terminological constraints on graphs and our querying of epistemic facts that allow for handling shared and divergent beliefs.

Bio: Dr. Steffen Staab is full professor for analytic computing at University of Stuttgart, Germany, and chair for Web and computer science at University of Southampton, UK. At University of Stuttgart, Steffen is speaker for the Excellence Cluster „Data-integrated simulation science (SimTech)“, co-speaker for the research focus on „Reflecting Intelligent Systems (IRIS)“, and managing director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Steffen’s research interests are in hybrid intelligence that bridges between symbolic knowledge representations and machine-learned vectorizations of knowledge. Steffen is a fellow of the ACM, EurAI, ELLIS and AAIA.