Keet wins Best Paper Award at K-CAP 2017 Conference

Maria Keet from CS@UCT and her co-author Oliver Kutz from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, were awarded with the Best Paper Award for their paper entitled “Orchestrating a Network of Mereo(topo) logical Theories” at the Ninth International Conference on Knowledge Capture (K-CAP 2017), which took place 4-6 December in Austin, Texas, USA.
The paper first devises and structures 28 logical theories that are coherent fragments of mereotopology, which are theories about parts and location; e.g., to represent and reason over knowledge about landlocked countries (e.g., Lesotho), human anatomy, or the content of paintings and photos. It then demonstrates advanced orchestration of the theories with the Distributed Ontology, Model, and Specification Language, which is a metalanguage for multiple logics. Finally, it takes steps toward conflict resolution to handle better certain trade-offs between the theories and language features of decidable and undecidable logics. The latter avails of, and re-purposes, the “OWL classifier” tool that was developed by Aashiq Parker, Brian McGeorge, and Muhummad Patel for CS@UCT’s ontology engineering Honours module.