A Pattern to Align Them All: Integrating Different Modalities to Define Multi-Modal Entities

The ability to reason with and integrate different sensory inputs is the foundation underpinning human intelligence and it is the reason for the growing interest in modelling multi-modal information within Knowledge Graphs. Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs extend traditional Knowledge Graphs by associating an entity with its possible modal representations, including text, images, audio, and videos, all of which are used to convey the semantics of the entity. Despite the increasing attention that Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs have received, there is a lack of consensus about the definitions and modelling of modalities, whose definition is often determined by application domains. In this paper, we propose a novel ontology design pattern that captures the separation of concerns between an entity (and the information it conveys), whose semantics can have different manifestations across different media, and its realisation in terms of a physical information entity. By introducing this abstract model, we aim to facilitate the harmonisation and integration of different existing multi-modal ontologies which is crucial for many intelligent applications across different domains spanning from medicine to digital humanities.

OntoChat: a Framework for Conversational Ontology Engineering using Language Models

Ontology engineering (OE) in large projects poses a number of challenges arising from the heterogeneous backgrounds of the various stakeholders, domain experts, and their complex interactions with ontology designers. This multi-party interaction often creates systematic ambiguities and biases from the elicitation of ontology requirements, which directly affect the design, evaluation and may jeopardise the target reuse. Meanwhile, current OE methodologies strongly rely on manual activities (e.g., interviews, discussion pages). After collecting evidence on the most crucial OE activities, we introduce OntoChat, a framework for conversational ontology engineering that supports requirement elicitation, analysis, and testing. By interacting with a conversational agent, users can steer the creation of user stories and the extraction of competency questions, while receiving computational support to analyse the overall requirements and test early versions of the resulting ontologies. We evaluate OntoChat by replicating the engineering of the Music Meta Ontology, and collecting preliminary metrics on the effectiveness of each component from users. We release all code at https://github.com/King-s-Knowledge-Graph-Lab/OntoChat.

The Music Meta Ontology: a flexible semantic model for the interoperability of music metadata

The semantic description of music metadata is a key requirement for the creation of music datasets that can be aligned, integrated, and accessed for information retrieval and knowledge discovery. It is nonetheless an open challenge due to the complexity of musical concepts arising from different genres, styles, and periods -- standing to benefit from a lingua franca to accommodate various stakeholders (musicologists, librarians, data engineers, etc.). To initiate this transition, we introduce the Music Meta ontology, a rich and flexible semantic model to describe music metadata related to artists, compositions, performances, recordings, and links. We follow eXtreme Design methodologies and best practices for data engineering, to reflect the perspectives and the requirements of various stakeholders into the design of the model, while leveraging ontology design patterns and accounting for provenance at different levels (claims, links). After presenting the main features of Music Meta, we provide a first evaluation of the model, alignments to other schema (Music Ontology, DOREMUS, Wikidata), and support for data transformation.

The Music Annotation Pattern

The annotation of music content is a complex process to represent due to its inherent multifaceted, subjectivity, and interdisciplinary nature. Numerous systems and conventions for annotating music have been developed as independent standards over the past decades. Little has been done to make them interoperable, which jeopardises cross-corpora studies as it requires users to familiarise with a multitude of conventions. Most of these systems lack the semantic expressiveness needed to represent the complexity of the musical language and cannot model multi-modal annotations originating from audio and symbolic sources. In this article, we introduce the Music Annotation Pattern, an Ontology Design Pattern (ODP) to homogenise different annotation systems and to represent several types of musical objects (e.g. chords, patterns, structures). This ODP preserves the semantics of the object's content at different levels and temporal granularity. Moreover, our ODP accounts for multi-modality upfront, to describe annotations derived from different sources, and it is the first to enable the integration of music datasets at a large scale.

SOLIS: Autonomous Solubility Screening using Deep Neural Networks

Accelerating material discovery has tremendous societal and industrial impact, particularly for pharmaceuticals and clean energy production. Many experimental instruments have some degree of automation, facilitating continuous running and higher throughput. However, it is common that sample preparation is still carried out manually. This can result in researchers spending a significant amount of their time on repetitive tasks, which introduces errors and can prohibit production of statistically relevant data. Crystallisation experiments are common in many chemical fields, both for purification and in polymorph screening experiments. The initial step often involves a solubility screen of the molecule; that is, understanding whether molecular compounds have dissolved in a particular solvent. This usually can be time consuming and work intensive. Moreover, accurate knowledge of the precise solubility limit of the molecule is often not required, and simply measuring a threshold of solubility in each solvent would be sufficient. To address this, we propose a novel cascaded deep model that is inspired by how a human chemist would visually assess a sample to determine whether the solid has completely dissolved in the solution. In this paper, we design, develop, and evaluate the first fully autonomous solubility screening framework, which leverages state-of-the-art methods for image segmentation and convolutional neural networks for image classification. To realise that, we first create a dataset comprising different molecules and solvents, which is collected in a real-world chemistry laboratory. We then evaluated our method on the data recorded through an eye-in-hand camera mounted on a seven degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator, and show that our model can achieve 99.13% test accuracy across various setups.