Law and the Semantic Web : Legal Ontologies, Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval, and Applications
As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.
Case-Based Approximate Reasoning
Case-based reasoning (CBR) has received a great deal of attention in recent years and has established itself as a core methodology in the field of artificial intelligence. The key idea of CBR is to tackle new problems by referring to similar problems that have already been solved in the past. More precisely, CBR proceeds from individual experiences in the form of cases. The generalization beyond these experiences typically relies on a kind of regularity assumption demanding that 'similar problems have similar solutions'. Making use of different frameworks of approximate reasoning and reasoning under uncertainty, notably probabilistic and fuzzy set-based techniques, this book develops formal models of the above inference principle, which is fundamental to CBR. The case-based approximate reasoning methods thus obtained especially emphasize the heuristic nature of case-based inference and aspects of uncertainty in CBR. This way, the book contributes to a solid foundation of CBR which is grounded on formal concepts and techniques from the aforementioned fields. Besides, it establishes interesting relationships between CBR and approximate reasoning, which not only cast new light on existing methods but also enhance the development of novel approaches and hybrid systems.
An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering
Knowledge Engineering refers to the development of systems that use knowledge, rather than data, to solve many novel computing problems. This is achieved by the application of computing techniques, closely associated with human cognitive processes, for transforming data into knowledge. An Introduction to Knowledge Engineering presents a simple but detailed exploration of current and established work in the field.
Active Knowledge Modeling of Enterprises
An AKM solution is about exploiting the Web as a knowledge engineering medium, and developing knowledge-model-based families of platforms, model-configured workplaces and services.
Knowledge-Driven Computing : Knowledge Engineering and Intelligent Computations
Knowledge-Driven Computing constitutes an emerging area of intensive research located at the intersection of Computational Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering with strong mathematical foundations. It embraces methods and approaches coming from diverse computational paradigms, such as evolutionary computation and nature-inspired algorithms, logic programming and constraint programming, rule-based systems, fuzzy sets and many others. The use of various knowledge representation formalisms and knowledge processing and computing paradigms is oriented towards the efficient resolution of computationally complex and difficult problems.
Knowledge Representation Techniques : A Rough Set Approach
The basis for the material in this book centers around a long term research project with autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle systems. One of the main research topics in the project is knowledge representation and reasoning. The focus of the research has been on the development of tractable combinations of approximate and nonmonotonic reasoning systems. The techniques developed are based on intuitions from rough set theory. Efforts have been made to take theory into practice by instantiating research results in the context of traditional relational database or deductive database systems.
Knowledge acquisition in practice: A step-by-step guide
Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in knowledge. Leading organisations now recognise the importance of identifying what they know, sharing what they know and using what they know for maximum benefit. Many organisations employ knowledge engineers to capture knowledge from experts using the principles and techniques of knowledge engineering. The emphasis is on a structured approach built on a sound understanding of the psychology of expertise and making use of knowledge modelling methods and the latest web technologies. Knowledge Acquisition in Practice is the first book to provide a detailed step-by-step guide to the methods and practical aspects of acquiring, modelling, storing and sharing knowledge. The reader is led through 47 steps from the inception of a project to its successful conclusion. Each step is described in terms of the reasons for the step, the required resources, the activities to be undertaken, and the solutions to common problems.






