23-02-2015
NOVA LINCS/DI/FCT student Tobias Kaminski, co-supervised by Prof. João Leite and Dr. Matthias Knorr, won the European Master’s Program in Computational Logic Best Thesis Award 2014.
The award was decided by the EMCL Joint Comission composed of representatives of the four partner universities: Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Technical University of Dresden, Technical University of Vienna, and Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
In his thesis, titled “Efficient Paraconsistent Reasoning with Rules and Ontologies for the Semantic Web”, Tobias Kaminski tackles the problem of dealing with inconsistent knowledge bases consisting of ontologies and non-monotonic rules, following a paraconsistent reasoning approach with a focus on efficiency. This is an important research problem since inconsistencies – which commonly trivialize standard reasoning services – may easily occur in such hybrid knowledge bases, particularly when combining knowledge originating from different sources. Paraconsistent reasoning allows one to obtain meaningful conclusions from the consistent part of the knowledge base when other methods that involve changing the knowledge base are not effective.
The result is an original and significant contribution to the state of the art of paraconsistent reasoning in hybrid knowledge bases. At the same time, the results have a strong potential impact on implementations of paraconsistent reasoning in hybrid knowledge bases.
