IAI +012
Structural Knowledge
- Structural knowledge: the relationship between concepts and objects in the world.
- Hierarchical approach: built on classification and uses hierarchies as the structures for knowledge representation, presented in a graphical format.
- Semantic networks: nodes represent concepts, and edges represent relationships between concepts.
- Ontologies
- A formal specification of concepts, relationships, and constraints within a domain that enables machines to reason automatically.
- It defines classes (concepts), subclasses (hierarchical relations), and properties (attributes or relations) that describe how entities interact.
- Unlike simple taxonomies, ontologies also include logical axioms and constraints that specify allowable relationships and permit inference and consistency checking through automated reasoning.
- Classes: Main concepts or categories (e.g. Person, Animal).
- Subclasses: Subcategories (e.g. Dog ⊂ Animal).
- Properties: Attributes (e.g. hasPart, hasColor).
- Relations: Connection rules (e.g. MemberOf, SubsetOf).
- Constraints: Logical constraints (e.g. disjointness, transitivity) that enable inference.
Requirement of hierarchices
- Inclusiveness:
Dog ⊆ Mammal ⊆ Animal - Species/differentia:
Dog = Mammal + (barks, canine traits, etc.) - Inheritance:
Mammal: has_fur, gives_live_birth→Dog: inherits all Mammal properties - Transitivity: If
Dog ⊆ MammalandMammal ⊆ Animal, thenDog ⊆ Animal - Systematic and predictable rules for association and distinction
- Mutual exclusivity:
Reptile ∩ Mammal = ∅ - Necessary and sfficient criteria:
- Necessary:
- Sufficient:
Advantage of hierarchical approach
- Inferring from incomplete evidence (if the shared criteria are not obvious or easily observable).
Animal → Mammal → Dog: If an entity is classified as a Mammal, we can infer properties such as having fur and giving live birth, even if the entity is not explicitly identified as a Dog.
- Excellent representations in mature domains
- Domains where entities and relationships are well understood and stable
- e.g. medical diagnosis, biological taxonomy, type systems in programming languages.
- Useful for entities that are well defined and have clear class boudnaries.
- Good fit: HTTP status codes, chemical elements, and biological species
- Poor fit: emotions, social roles, and cultural practices
- Some theory or model is necessary to guide the identification
- Provides criteria for defining entities and relationships
- e.g. Evolutionary theory in biological taxonomy, Type theory in programming languages
Partition
A partition of a category is a set of subcategories that form a disjoint, exhaustive composition of that category.
- Disjoint: Two or more categories are disjoint if they don't share common members.
- Exhaustive composition: The subcategories together cover all members of the parent category, leaving no member unclassified.
- Examples:
- ❌ Category: Animal (Not a partition)
- Mammal, Bird (Reptiles, fish, insects are missing, not exhaustive)
- ✅ Category: Integer (Partition)
- Even, Odd (Disjoint and exhaustive)
- ❌ Category: Animal (Not a partition)
Physical composition
- PartOf Relation:
Partof(a, b)is a relation representing that one thing, 'a', is a part of another thing, 'b'. - BunchOf Relation:
BunchOf(a)is a relation, taking a set of objects 'a', to represent a composite object made up of those parts. - Examples:
Partof(Wheel, Car): A wheel is part of a car (one-to-one relation).BunchOf({Wheel1, Wheel2, Wheel3, Wheel4}): A car is a bunch of four wheels (many-to-one relation).
- Link between
PartOfandBunchOf: - Why useful?
- Reasoning from individual
parts -> group -> larger object. - Avoiding ambiguity between: "this thing is part of", "these things together form"
- Without
BunchOf, ontologies cannot represent: piles, colleciton, aggregates, composite physical structures.
- Reasoning from individual
Measurements
- Quantitive measures (Ratio, Interval)
- Represented as numbers with units
- Support arithmetic and unit conversion
- Enable numeric reasoing (e.g. 2.54cm = 1 inch)
- Non-quantitative measures (Ordinal)
- Cannot be meaningufully represented as numbers
- Can still be compared using ordering relactions (
<,>,=) - Suppor qualitative reasoning (e.g. one task is more difficult than another)
Objects
- Stuff
- Represents substances
- Uncountable masses
- Definitions include only intrinsic properties (e.g. Butter, Unsalted Butter)
- Things
- Represents discrete objects
- Countable entities
- Definitions include extrinsic properties (e.g. PoundOfButter, StickOfButter)
- It depends on measurement
- It depends on contextual constraints
Time
- Fluent: a condition whose truth value can change over time.
- e.g. "The box is on the table", ,
- a time-dependent proposition.
- Time scale and absolute time
- Ontology represents time along a single continuous timeline with a fixed reference point.
- It allows arithmetic operations on time and comparisons between time points.
- Time intertvals
- Time can be represented as moments (instants) or intervals (durations).
- Partition of time
- All time intervals can be partitioned into moments and extended (non-zero-length) intervals.
- It provides a complete and precise ontology of time.
Event calculus
- : Fluent is true for all time between time and .
- : Event start at time and ends at time .
- : Event causes fluent to become true at time .
- : Event causes fluent to cease to be true at time .
- : Fluent becomes true at some point between and .
- : Fluent ceases to be true at some point between and .
- : Time point occurs before time point .
- Happens(PutBoxOnTable, 10, 12)
- Initiate(PutBoxOnTable, On(Box, Table), 12)
- Initiated(On(box, table), 10, 12)
- T(On(Box, Table), 12, 20)
- Terminates(RemoveBoxFromTable, On(Box, Table), 20)
- Terminated(On(box, table), 18, 22)
Successor-state axiom
후속상태공리
- Define how the world changes after an action occurs.
- what changes when an action happens
- what stays the same.
- Without successor-state axioms, we face the frame problem:
- after every action, we would need to explicitly list all facts that did not change.
- : moving block A from the top of block B to position X.
- Preconditions:
- : A is on top of B
- : nothing is on top of A
- : nothing is on position X
- Effects:
- : A is now on position X
- : B is now clear
- : X is no longer clear (X is now occupied by A)
- Preconditions:
Semantic networks
- Visually represent a knowledge base.
- Support efficient inference.
- Allow properties of an object ot be inferred from its category membership.
- Representing individual objects, categories of objects, and relations among objects.
- Categories are the primary buildling blokcs of large-scale knowledge representation schemes.
Taxonomy hierarchy
- A hierarchical structure of categories
- Each lower category is a more specific kind of its parent
- Organized from general → specific
University Ontology
| Entity | Class | Example Statemnets |
|---|---|---|
| Alice | Student | , |
| Prof.Smith | Lecturer | , |
| CS101 | Course |
Knowledge graph
- represents information and its relationships using a graph structure.
- Nodes: entities or concepts (e.g. people, places, things).
- Edges: relationships between nodes (e.g. "is a", "part of", "located in").
Types of Knowledge Graphs
- General Knowledge Graphs
- Domain-Specific Knowledge Graphs
- Semantic Knowledge Graphs
- Social Knowledge Graphs
- Temporal Knowledge Graphs
- Special Knowledge Graphs
- Statistical Knowledge Graphs
- Probabilistic Knowledge Graphs
- Textual Knowledge Graphs
- Multi-modal Knowledge Graphs
General Knowledge Graphs
- Comprehensive information representation
- Entity-Relationship Structure
- Linked Data
- Semantic Enrichment
- Capabilities & Use Cases
- Querying and Analysis
- Data Integration
- ML and AI applications
Examples
- DBPedia: RDF, resource descritions framework
- Wikidata
- YAGO
- Google Knowledge Graph
- Microsoft Academic Graph
- IBM Watson Knowledge Studio
Reasoning for categories
- Infer the presence of certain objects from perceptual input
- Infer category membership from perceived properties
- Use category information to make predictions
- It enables an agent to identify objects from observed properties and to predict further characteristics using category knowledge.
Reasoning using Semantic networks
- Semantic networks are:
- systems designed specifically for organizing categories reasoning with categories.
- Provide graphical representations of a knowledge base
- Using a semanctic network, reasoning can be performed based on:
- relationships between objects
- category membership
- inheritance between categories
- properties associated with categories
- Allows an object to inherit general knowledge from its category.
- The inheritance algorithm:
- Starts from the object itself
- Follows links upwards through the category hierarchy
- Stops as soon as it finds a value for the property
- This suppors efficient reasoning, default values, and exception handling.
RDF
Resource Description Framework (RDF)
- Triple Structure:
subject -> predicate -> object - Subject: represents the resource being described or identified by a URI.
- Predicate (or Property): desribes the relationship between the subject and the object. also represented by a URI.
- Object: represents the value or target of the relationship. It can be a URI or a literal (a string, number, or date).









