Ph.D. Preliminary Exam - George Voutsadakis

Date: 05 Mar, 2009
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: 223 Atanasoff Hall
Topic: Federated Description Logics and Secrecy-Preserving Reasoning for the Semantic Web
Major Professor(s): Giora Slutzki and Vasant Honavar


Abstract:

Description logics are decidable fragments of first-order logic that are adopted as the underlying theoretical foundations on which almost all currently used ontology languages are based.
Federated description logics are proposed as the corresponding foundations of ontologies that consist of multiple independently developed but interrelated autonomous ontology modules. We provide the motivation and related work, our initial results and our plans for the study of a specific family of federated description logics, Contextualized Federated Description Logics (CFDLs), whose main feature is contextualization of all logical connectives.

Secrecy-preserving reasoning is the kind of reasoning that occurs when a knowledge base containing secret or sensitive information is queried by one or more querying agents. When answering these queries, the knowledge base is facing the task of being as truthful as possible while, at the same time, concealing effectively the sensitive information. Our logic-based approach allows using both publicly available and secret data to answer queries as truthfully as possible without, however, divulging any secret information. We present the motivation for this study, related work, work we have already accomplished as well as our future plans.