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KBpedia Upper Ontology is Revised

12/05/2016

 

CORALVILLE, IA (12/05/2016) -- Cognonto today announced the release of version 1.20 of KBpedia, its knowledge structure that integrates six major knowledge bases (Wikipedia, Wikidata, OpenCyc, GeoNames, DBpedia and UMBEL) and 20 subsidiary ones under the KBpedia Knowledge Ontology (KKO). KBpedia's explicit purpose is to provide a foundation for knowledge-based artificial intelligence (KBAI) by supporting the (nearly) automatic creation of training corpuses and positive and negative training sets and feature sets for deep, unsupervised and supervised machine learning.

The changes in this new release are solely related to KKO, the knowledge graph portion of KBpedia. There are two major drivers for this update to the KBpedia upper ontology. First, internal development efforts are now focusing on the modeling of predicates and time and action. This effort affects the definitions, splits and boundaries between attributes, relations, events and activities. Revisions in this area have been based on a much closer reading of Charles Sanders Peirce's writings in this area, based on Cognonto's view that CSP has the most logical and sophisticated understanding of knowledge representation yet expressed. Second, where appropriate, Cognonto has relied on Peircean terminology to capture specific concepts. Cognonto is doing this to make KKO more amenable to review by Peircean scholars. At the same time, Cognonto has tried to reduce the use of obscure or difficult Peircean terms where they might be a barrier to understanding.

These changes solely affect two of the three main branches in KKO. The most affected branch is Monads, the branch representing Firstness, reflecting the basic concepts or building blocks used in KKO. The Particulars branch, which captures the representation of individuals or instances, also was modified to capture those changes in the Monads branch. The Generals branch, the main portion for classes and types, was not affected by these changes.

The resulting KKO upper structure now has about 165 key concepts. The basic layout and further background discussion is provided on this Cognonto page.

KBpedia and KKO are the first complete attempt to capture Charles S. Peirce's views of the logical organization of knowledge and the theory of signs into a working computer ontology (knowledge graph). As with Peirce's views of 'truth' as a limit function that can be approached but never fully attained, Cognonto will continue to strive to improve its understanding of how best to model knowledge for artificial intelligence purposes. The good news is Cognonto is already realizing significant KBAI benefits from KBpedia in its current form. The company expects those benefits to continue to grow with further refinements over time.

The open source KBpedia Knowledge Ontology (KKO) may be downloaded and inspected from here.

About Cognonto

Cognonto (a portmanteau of 'cognition' and 'ontology') exploits large-scale knowledge bases and semantic technologies for machine learning, data interoperability and mapping, and fact and entity extraction and tagging. Cognonto LLC is privately held and is based in Coralville, Iowa, USA, with offices in Québec City, Québec, Canada.

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