EXMO Research team

Computer mediated exchange of structured knowledge

Team presentation

EXMO studies the communication of formalised knowledge mediated by computers. The formalism can range from XML - structured, general but without semantics - to knowledge representation languages - structured, semantically characterised, but with a narrow scope of expression.

EXMO aims at developing theoretical and software tools to help the organisation, manipulation, presentation and combination of structured knowledge chunks while allowing communication between people. During the communication process, a computer can add value to its medium and memory functions by performing advanced operations such as formatting, filtering, categorising, consistency checking, or generalising.

Ensuring the suitability and intelligibility of knowledge for the users requires to develop an abstract understanding of representations and the transformations applied to them. The research of the EXMO action is focused in two directions. The transformation topic accounts for the modification of knowledge during the communication while the communication topic accounts for the preservation of intelligibility through transformations.

Research themes

The goal of the transformation theme is the elaboration of a ``general theory of transformations'' based on the properties that transformations satisfy. Such properties include content or structure preservation, source traceability, or conversely, confidentiality. As a first step we study some particular properties in order to show the benefits of this approach:

  • Meaning preservation (are the consequences of a transformed representation, the transformed consequences of the initial representation?) is one of our main topic of investigation. We study how it can be satisfied in homogeneous families of languages. Transformations, their properties and the proofs of these properties are exploited together in order to check properties or to use them in other proofs.

  • Information preservation is studied in a lattice representation of information. This model is related to intuitionistic epistemic logic which should allow the computation of the properties satisfied by transformations with regard to information.

  • Scenarii preservation when multimedia documents are adapted to various devices ensures that some part of the document can still be played. This consists in preserving classes of models of the document through the transformation (where a model is one potential execution of the document).

The long term communication theme aims at preserving the intelligibility of the transformed knowledge for people. It considers ``semiotic'' properties which refers to the way people interpret the representations.

Expected applications are transformation system engineering (in which information systems are understood as transformation flows) and ``semantic web'' (knowledge servers, content representation and knowledge transformation).

Keywords: Knowledge representation Knowledge bases Object knowledge models Classification Categorisation Types Constraints Tasks Problem solving Molecular biology Multiple standpoints Medicine diagnosis Granula

Research teams of the same theme :

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