Rapid Knowledge Formation Project for Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory

Rapid Knowledge Formation Project
for the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory

The Rapid Knowledge Formation Project (RKF) is a DARPA sponsored program with the goal of allowing distributed teams of subject matter experts to quickly and easily build, maintain, and use knowledge bases. This research effort is co-led by Richard Fikes and Deborah McGuinness. More recently, KSL has also focused on improving the efficiency of query answering with large and distributed knowledge bases. This research effort on partition-based logical reasoning is led by Sheila McIlraith.

The Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory proposal is entitled "Creating, Maintaining, and Integrating Understandable Knowledge Bases" and is available here in Word format.

Project Pages

Research Team

External Collaborators

Eyal Amir (UC Berkeley)
Tomas Uribe (SRI)

Research Focus

Explanations for Query Answering: Infrastructure for explaining answers by storing, exchanging, combining, annotating, abstracting, comparing and rendering proofs and proof fragments provided by reasoners embedded in query answering environments.
Click here for further information on this project.
Human-Knowledge Base Interaction: Testing adequacy and correctness of knowledge bases. (The Chimaera Ontology environment provides extensive diagnostic support for ontologies.)
Theory Manipulation: Mapping and merging knowledge bases with support for conflict detection and resolution. (The Chimaera Ontology Environment provides support for merging multiple knowledge bases in OKBC-compliant languages.)
Knowledge Formation: Structural comparisons of objects and knowledge bases to support identification of analogous objects or scenarios.
Default representation and reasoning for large-scale knowledge bases.
Partonomic representation and reasoning for large-scale knowledge bases.
Efficient Query Answering: Automatically partitioning KBs and reasoning with partitioned KBs.
Click here for further information on this project.

Related Publications

Explanations for Query Answering

Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. "Infrastructure for Web Explanations". To appear in Proceedings of 2nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003), Sanibel, FL, USA. Springer, October 2003. Abstract, PDF.

Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. "Registry-Based Support for Information Integration". To appear in Proceedings of IJCAI-2003's Workshop on Information Integration on the Web, Acapulco, Mexico. August, 2003. Also Technical Report KSL-03-03, Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, USA, 2003. Abstract, PDF.

Deborah L. McGuinness and Paulo Pinheiro da Silva. "Inference Web: Portable and Shareable Explanations for Question Answering". In Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Workshop on New Directions for Question Answering. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. pages 67-71, AAAI Press, March 2003. PDF.

Deborah L. McGuinness. "Knowledge Representation for Question Answering". In Proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Spring Symposium Workshop on New Directions for Question Answering. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. pages 75-77, AAAI Press, March 2003.

Ontology Environments and Chimaera

McGuinness, Deborah L. "Conceptual Modeling for Distributed Ontology Environments." In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Conceptual Structures Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues (ICCS 2000). Darmstadt, Germany. August 14-18, 2000. Abstract. Paper available in Word format and postscript.

McGuinness, Deborah L., Richard Fikes, James Rice, and Steve Wilder. "The Chimaera Ontology Environment." Proceedings of the Seventeenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2000). Austin, Texas. July 30 - August 3, 2000. Abstract. Paper available in Word format.

McGuinness, Deborah L., Richard Fikes, James Rice, and Steve Wilder. "An Environment for Merging and Testing Large Ontologies." Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2000). Breckenridge, Colorado, USA. April 12-15, 2000. Abstract.

Partitioning Knowledge Bases

Bill MacCartney, Sheila A. McIlraith, Eyal Amir, Tomas Uribe, "Practical Partition-Based Theorem Proving for Large Knowledge Bases". To appear in the Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-03), August 2003.

Amir, E. and McIlraith, S., "Partition-Based Logical Reasoning for First-Order and Propositional Theories". Accepted for publication in Artificial Intelligence. draft

McIlraith, S. and Amir, E. "Theorem Proving with Structured Theories", Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01). pp. 624 -- 631, August, 2001. Copyright 2001 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (www.ijcai.org).

Amir, E. and McIlraith, S. "Solving Satisfiability using Decomposition and the Most Constrained Subproblem", Proceedings of SAT 2001: the Workshop on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing. Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics, Volume 9, Henry Kautz and Bart Selman (Ed.), June, 2001.

Amir, E. and McIlraith, S. "Partition-Based Logical Reasoning", Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'2000), pgs 389--400, 2000.

Amir, Eyal and Sheila McIlraith. "Improving the Efficiency of Reasoning Through Structure-Based Reformulation." Proceedings of the Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation (SARA2000). Published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1864. Lake LBJ, Texas. July 2000.

Amir, Eyal and Sheila McIlraith. "Partition-Based Logical Reasoning." Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2000). Breckenridge, Colorado, USA. April 12-15, 2000: 389-400. Abstract. Paper available in postscript.

Pruning Knowledge Bases and Object Presentations

Baader, Franz, Alex Borgida, Ralph Kuesters and Deborah L. McGuinness. "Matching in Description Logics." Journal of Logic and Computation -- Special Issue on Description Logics. Volume 9, number 3, June 1999. Abstract. Paper available in PDF.

Baader, Franz,Alex Borgida, and Deborah L. McGuinness. "Matching in Description Logics: Preliminary Results." Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS 98). Edited by M. L. Mugnier and M. Chein. Published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 1998. An earlier version appears in Proceedings of the 1998 International Workshop on Description Logics. Trento, Italy. June 1998. Abstract.

Borgida, Alex and Deborah L. McGuinness. "Asking Queries about Frames." Proceedings of Fifth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Morgan Kaufmann. Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 1996. Also appears in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics. Cambridge, Mass. November 1996. Abstract.

Related Events

RKF PI Meeting, May 13-15 2003, San Diego, CA. Presentation by Deborah L. McGuinness, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva and Bill MacCartney on Inference Web: Portable and Sharable Proofs for Hybrid Systems..
RKF PI Meeting. November 13-15, 2002. Presentation by Bill MacCartney on Partition-Based Logical Reasoning.
RKF PI Meeting. February 27 - March 1, 2001. Presentation by McIlraith on Knowledge Base Partitioning. Presentation by McGuinness on Explanation for Query Answering (ppt).
RKF PI Meeting. October 17-19, 2001. Presentation by Fikes on Knowledge Base Partitioning (ppt). Presentation by Fikes and McGuinness on KB Diagnostics (ppt).
RKF PI Meeting. January 24-26, 2001. Presentation by Fikes and McGuinness on KB Diagnostics (html) (ppt).
McGuinness presents invited talk on "Conceptual Modeling for Distributed Ontology Environments" at the Eighth International Conference on Conceptual Structures Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues (ICCS) in Darmstadt, Germany on August 16, 2000.
Presentation of the Chimaera Ontology Environment at the Intelligent Systems Demonstrations at AAAI 2000. Demos by Jessica Jenkins, Steve Wilder, and Deborah McGuinness on Tuesday, August 1, at 5:30 and Wednesday, August 2, 2000, from 6-10 p.m.
RKF Kickoff Meeting. June 7-9, 2000. Presentations by McGuinness and Fikes on Creating, Maintaining, and Integrating Understandable Knowledge Bases (html) (ppt) and Commonsense Reasoning with Defaults (html).
McGuinness presents the paper "An Environment for Merging and Testing Large Ontologies" at KR 2000. Presentation on Friday, April 15, 2000, at 10:55 a.m.

Other Resources

RKF Mailing List

Last modified: Wednesday, 25-Jun-2003 11:19:05 PDT

Rapid Knowledge Formation Projectfor the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory