Logic Augmented Generation

Semantic Knowledge Graphs (SKG) face challenges with scalability, flexibility, contextual understanding, and handling unstructured or ambiguous information. However, they offer formal and structured knowledge enabling highly interpretable and reliable results by means of reasoning and querying. Large Language Models (LLMs) overcome those limitations making them suitable in open-ended tasks and unstructured environments. Nevertheless, LLMs are neither interpretable nor reliable. To solve the dichotomy between LLMs and SKGs we envision Logic Augmented Generation (LAG) that combines the benefits of the two worlds. LAG uses LLMs as Reactive Continuous Knowledge Graphs that can generate potentially infinite relations and tacit knowledge on-demand. SKGs are key for injecting a discrete heuristic dimension with clear logical and factual boundaries. We exemplify LAG in two tasks of collective intelligence, i.e., medical diagnostics and climate projections. Understanding the properties and limitations of LAG, which are still mostly unknown, is of utmost importance for enabling a variety of tasks involving tacit knowledge in order to provide interpretable and effective results.

The Water Health Open Knowledge Graph

Recently, an increasing interest in the management of water and health resources has been recorded. This interest is fed by the global sustainability challenges posed to the humanity that have water scarcity and quality at their core. Thus, the availability of effective, meaningful and open data is crucial to address those issues in the broader context of the Sustainable Development Goals of clean water and sanitation as targeted by the United Nations. In this paper, we present the Water Health Open Knowledge Graph (WHOW-KG) along with its design methodology and analysis on impact. WHOW-KG is a semantic knowledge graph that models data on water consumption, pollution, infectious disease rates and drug distribution. The WHOW-KG is developed in the context of the EU-funded WHOW (Water Health Open Knowledge) project and aims at supporting a wide range of applications: from knowledge discovery to decision-making, making it a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the water and health domains. The WHOW-KG consists of a network of five ontologies and related linked open data, modelled according to those ontologies.

Automatically Drafting Ontologies from Competency Questions with FrODO

We present the Frame-based ontology Design Outlet (FrODO), a novel method and tool for drafting ontologies from competency questions automatically. Competency questions are expressed as natural language and are a common solution for representing requirements in a number of agile ontology engineering methodologies, such as the eXtreme Design (XD) or SAMOD. FrODO builds on top of FRED. In fact, it leverages the frame semantics for drawing domain-relevant boundaries around the RDF produced by FRED from a competency question, thus drafting domain ontologies. We carried out a user-based study for assessing FrODO in supporting engineers for ontology design tasks. The study shows that FrODO is effective in this and the resulting ontology drafts are qualitative.

An Ontology Design Pattern for representing Recurrent Situations

In this paper, we present an Ontology Design Pattern for representing situations that recur at regular periods and share some invariant factors, which unify them conceptually: we refer to this set of recurring situations as recurrent situation series. The proposed pattern appears to be foundational, since it can be generalised for modelling the top-level domain-independent concept of recurrence, which is strictly associated with invariance. The pattern reuses other foundational patterns such as Collection, Description and Situation, Classification, Sequence. Indeed, a recurrent situation series is formalised as both a collection of situations occurring regularly over time and unified according to some properties that are common to all the members, and a situation itself, which provides a relational context to its members that satisfy a reference description. Besides including some exemplifying instances of this pattern, we show how it has been implemented and specialised to model recurrent cultural events and ceremonies in ArCo, the Knowledge Graph of Italian cultural heritage.

The Landscape of Ontology Reuse Approaches

Ontology reuse aims to foster interoperability and facilitate knowledge reuse. Several approaches are typically evaluated by ontology engineers when bootstrapping a new project. However, current practices are often motivated by subjective, case-by-case decisions, which hamper the definition of a recommended behaviour. In this chapter we argue that to date there are no effective solutions for supporting developers' decision-making process when deciding on an ontology reuse strategy. The objective is twofold: (i) to survey current approaches to ontology reuse, presenting motivations, strategies, benefits and limits, and (ii) to analyse two representative approaches and discuss their merits.

A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for Social Robots. The ultimate goal of this work is to establish a common ground based on a reference software architecture to allow to easily reuse robotic software components in order to rapidly develop, implement, and personalise Social Robots.

Pattern-based design applied to cultural heritage knowledge graphs

Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) have become an established and recognised practice for guaranteeing good quality ontology engineering. There are several ODP repositories where ODPs are shared as well as ontology design methodologies recommending their reuse. Performing rigorous testing is recommended as well for supporting ontology maintenance and validating the resulting resource against its motivating requirements. Nevertheless, it is less than straightforward to find guidelines on how to apply such methodologies for developing domain-specific knowledge graphs. ArCo is the knowledge graph of Italian Cultural Heritage and has been developed by using eXtreme Design (XD), an ODP- and test-driven methodology. During its development, XD has been adapted to the need of the CH domain e.g. gathering requirements from an open, diverse community of consumers, a new ODP has been defined and many have been specialised to address specific CH requirements. This paper presents ArCo and describes how to apply XD to the development and validation of a CH knowledge graph, also detailing the (intellectual) process implemented for matching the encountered modelling problems to ODPs. Relevant contributions also include a novel web tool for supporting unit-testing of knowledge graphs, a rigorous evaluation of ArCo, and a discussion of methodological lessons learned during ArCo development.

SQuAP-Ont: an Ontology of Software Quality Relational Factors from Financial Systems

Quality, architecture, and process are considered the keystones of software engineering. ISO defines them in three separate standards. However, their interaction has been scarcely studied, so far. The SQuAP model (Software Quality, Architecture, Process) describes twenty-eight main factors that impact on software quality in banking systems, and each factor is described as a relation among some characteristics from the three ISO standards. Hence, SQuAP makes such relations emerge rigorously, although informally. In this paper, we present SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology designed by following a well-established methodology based on the re-use of Ontology Design Patterns (i.e. ODPs). SQuAP-Ont formalises the relations emerging from SQuAP to represent and reason via Linked Data about software engineering in a three-dimensional model consisting of quality, architecture, and process ISO characteristics.

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact.