Logic meets the real world: How can logical reasoning be used to achieve higher-level situation awareness?#

Baader Franz#

Abstract

In many applications, agents (human or artificial) need to adapt to the situation at hand, for which awareness of the current situation is an important prerequisite. An important challenge in this setting is how to represent the relevant information about the current situation in a formally well-founded way, and how to integrate different pieces of such information into a coherent semantic view. To address this challenge, we propose to employ ontologies expressed in appropriate decidable, logic-based ontology languages. The question is then whether existing ontology languages such as OWL, which were designed for other purposes, are appropriate for this purpose, or whether extensions of these languages need to be designed. Is the expressive power of OWL sufficient for describing application-relevant situations, and are existing reasoning tools efficient enough to recognize situation in real time? A second important problem is how to transform (subsymbolic, numeric) sensor information into the corresponding symbolic (logical) context representation.