171830
Inconsistencies, Negations and Changes in Ontologies
Ontology management and maintenance are considered cornerstone issues in current Semantic Web applications in which semantic integration and ontological reasoning play a fundamental role. The ability to deal with inconsistency and to accommodate change is of utmost importance in real-world applications of ontological reasoning and management, wherein the need for expressing negated assertions also arises naturally. For this purpose, precise, formal definitions of the the different types of inconsistency and negation in ontologies are required. Unfortunately, ontology languages based on Description Logics (DLs) do not provide enough expressive power to represent axiom negations. Furthermore, there is no single, well-accepted notion of inconsistency and negation in the Semantic Web community, due to the lack of a common and solid foundational framework. In this paper, we propose a general framework accounting for inconsistency, negation and change in ontologies. Different levels of negation and inconsistency in DL-based ontologies are distinguished. We demonstrate how this framework can provide a foundation for reasoning with and management of dynamic ontologies.
13610294
Seeing is believing: A common sense theory of the adoption of perception-based beliefs
In this paper we present a formal common sense theory of the adoption of perception-based beliefs. We begin with a logical analysis of perception and then consider when perception should lead to belief change. Our theory is intended to apply to perception in humans and to perception in artificial agents at the level of the symbolic interface between a vision system and a belief system. In order to provide a context for our work we relate it to the emerging field of cognitive robotics, give an abstract architecture for an agent which is both embodied and capable of reasoning, and relate this to the concrete architectures of two vision-based surveillance systems.
19558398
Gestures for Embodied Agents with Logic Programming
The paper discusses how distributed logic programming can be used to define and control the hand gestures of embodied agents in virtual worlds, by using the STEP language as an interface between the constructs of logic programming and the humanoid model defined in Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML). By using this framework, different gesture dictionaries can be defined and variants of a hand gesture, according to dynamically changing factors, can be generated on the fly. The approach is tested on the demanding demonstrator of conducting, providing experience, also on time performance of the animation.
18313204
A taxonomy of web agents
We propose a taxonomy of Web agents, which encompasses agents that provide a text-based interface to, for example, information retrieval services as well as avatar-embodied guides that help visitors to navigate in virtual environments. Our taxonomy must be regarded as an instrument to delineate targets for research and the realization of prototype applications that demonstrate the usefulness of agent-based intelligence on the Web. In addition, we deploy our agent-taxonomy to establish the implications particular target applications have with respect to software architecture and computational resources.
1230191
3D agent-based virtual communities
In this paper we propose an approach to 3D agent-based virtual communities in which autonomous agents are participants in VRML-based virtual worlds to enhance the interaction with users or serve as intelligent navigation assistants. In addition, an agent communication language (ACL) is designed as a high-level communication facility, in particular for the realization of shared objects in virtual communities. As a typical example of 3D agent-based virtual communities, a VRML-based multi-user soccer game has been developed and implemented in the distributed logic programming language DLP. We discuss how DLP can be used for the implementation of 3D agent-based virtual communities.
38873444
Logics for Belief Dependence
In this paper, we investigate the theoretical foundations of belief dependence in multiple agent environment, where agents may rely on someone else about their beliefs or knowledge. Several logics for belief dependence are introduced and studied. First of all, we try to formalize the problem of belief dependence in the framework of general epistemic logics, by which we will argue that general epistemic logic is not appropriate to formalize the problem of belief dependence. Then, based on an approach which is similar to Fagin and Halpern's general awareness logic, we present the second logic for belief dependence, which is called a syntactic approach. The third logic is an adapted possible world logic, where sub-beliefs are directly introduced in the models.
7343489
Feature difference analysis in video authentication system
In most video authentication systems, the difference between features of the original and received videos is often used to decide the authenticity. In this paper, by employing mutual information to represent the similarity between the original and received video frames, we theoretically analyze the relationship between the feature difference and the video distortion. The relationship we derived is applied to estimate the maximum allowable feature difference in a video authentication system and to show how the feature difference varies with quantization step. Experimental results demonstrate that the derived relationship is reasonable and helpful for designing a robust video authentication system.
35430187
ITQS: an integrated transport query system
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGMOD 2004 June 13-18, 2004, Paris, France. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-859-8/04/06 . . . <5.00. '( )%* & 5 6 '( & . & = = & 5
1637377
XSTEP: a markup language for embodied agents
In this paper we propose an XML-based markup language. called XSTEP for embodied agents, based on the scripting language STEP. XSTEP is the XML-based successor of STEP. The scripting language STEP incorporates the formal semantics of dynamic logic, and has been implemented in the distributed logic programming language DLP, a tool for the implementation of 3D Web agents. In this paper we discuss the issues of markup language design for embodied agents and several aspects of the implementation and application of XSTEP.
17908385
The hierarchical degree-of-visibility tree
In this paper, we present a novel structure called the hierarchical degree-of-visibility tree (HDoV-tree) for visibility query processing in visualization systems. The HDoV-tree builds on and extends the R-tree such that 1) the search space is pruned based on the degree of visibility of objects and 2) internal nodes store level-of-details (LoDs) that represent a collection of objects in a coarser form. We propose two tree traversal algorithms that balance performance and visual fidelity, explore three storage structures for the HDoV-tree, and develop novel caching techniques for disk-based HDoV-tree. We implemented the HDoV-tree in a prototype walkthrough system called VISUAL. Our experimental study shows that VISUAL can lead to high frame rates without compromising visual fidelity.
14234865
An adaptive sampling method for layered depth image
Sampling issue is an important problem in image based rendering. In this paper, we propose an adaptive sampling method to improve the layered depth image framework. Different from the existing methods of interpolating or splatting neighboring pixels, our method selects a set of sampling views based on the scene analysis that can guarantee the final rendering quality. Furthermore, the rendering speed is accelerated by the precomputed patch lookup table, which simplifies the reference view selection process to a simple lookup of a hash table. We have implemented our method. The experiment study shows the advantage of the method