Making Software Making Software Agents SmarterAgents Smarter

Tim FininUniversity of Maryland,

Baltimore CountyICAART 2010, 22 January 2010

http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/resource/html/id/287/

Motivation

The web has made people smarter and more capable

Motivation

It provides easy access to most of the world's knowledge and services

Motivation

Web standards, protocols & technology work better than earlier distributed infor-mation system technologies

But what about our agents?

tell

register

Agents still have a very minimal under-standing of text, images and video

Motivation

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tell

register

Software agents need better access to a Web of knowledge to amplify their intelligence and knowledge

Motivation

DBpediaDBpediaDBpediaDBpedia

DBpediaDBpedia

DBpediaDBpedia

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tell

register

Key technologies: Semantic Web, linked data, text information extraction, Wikipedia derived KBs, etc.

ACLs

• Agents and knowledge has been a focus of agent communication languages (ACLs)

• Much of the ACL work has focused on primitives, protocols and infrastructure

• Less attention has been applied to finding, sharing and integrating ontologies, common background data, and populating KBs from the Web

Linked data and Wikipedia• Wikipedia as a source of knowledge

– Wikis are an effective tool for building know-ledge resources: consensus driven, dynamic, high quality and free

• Wikipedia as an ontology– Every Wikipedia page is a concept or object

• Wikipedia as RDF data– Map this ontology into RDF

• DBpedia as the lynchpin for Linked Data– Exploit its breadth of coverage to integrate

information

Linked Data on the Web, 3/09

~5 billion integrated facts ~5 billion integrated facts published on the Web as published on the Web as

RDF RDF Linked DataLinked Data

Wikipedia is the new Cyc

• There’s a history of using ency-clopedias to develop KBs

• Cyc’s original goal (c. 1984) wasto encode the knowledge in adesktop encyclopedia

• And use it as an integrating ontology

• Wikipedia is comparable to Cyc’s original desktop encyclopedia

• But it’s machine accessible and malleable

Populating Freebase KB

Underlying Powerset’s KB

Driving AskWiki’s answers

With sometimes surprising results

Mined by TrueKnowledge

Source of Faviki tags

Conclusion, for now

• The web has made people smarter and more capable, providing easy access to the world's knowledge and services

• Software agents need better access to a Web of knowledge to amplify whatever intelligence they have

• Some key technologies are ready to exploit: Semantic Web, linked data, DBpedia, Wikitology, etc.

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