Future Works on WebKB-2

Knowledge Base Content

• Addition of schemas to top-level categories to ease the entering of information on common matters (schemas are exploited for generating menus).


• Completion of the integration of the DOLCE ontology.


• Integration of the SUMO ontology.


• Integration of the CIA World Factbook.
Can be given as student project.

• Addition of descriptions of commercial products (e.g. of cars from Southport car dealers) to prepare the use of WebKB-2 as an enhanced Yellow-Pages tool. Can be given as student project.


• Long term: representation of some knowledge acquisition models and parts of WebKB-2 documentation into the KB. Can be given as student project.

Cooperation mechanisms

• Completion of the implementation of the cooperation rules as published in my ICCS'01 article and refinement of the graph redundancy detection rules (they are currently a bit too restricting).


• Long term: extension of the current annotation system to handle "votes". Votes are simple kinds of annotation but they may be numerous and need to be averaged. This is more a presentation problem than an architectural problem. Can be given as student project.

Knowledge Retrieval mechanisms

• Completion of graph comparison/retrieval procedures (this does not yet include path retrieval but includes the retrieval of all possible contexts).


• Implementation of path retrieval procedures.


• Permitting semi-private information, i.e. information that is displayed to a user only if s/he meets certain criteria specified by the information creator. The creator is also automatically mailed the semi-private information about the querying user (example of application: dating-agency-like services).

Reasoning mechanisms

• Student project: implementation of forward-chaining and backward chaining rule based system where rules and constraints are expressed via graphs (FCG, FE, RDF, ...); the approach used in CoGITaNT will be followed, and then extended to take into account some rule priority system, arithmetic operators and rules expressing positive or negative constraints (as in Guy Mineau's articles). The rules may be tested on the Sisyphus-I problem to which we have given a procedural solution with the WebKB-1 script language and for which we have begun a rule-based model. Subsequent Sisyphus problems may also be used as testbeds.


• Implementation of pipes and functions in the WebKB-2 script language.

Inport/Export Languages

• Completion of the handling of all the FCG grammar.


• Handling of Formalized English (FE). Can be given as student project.


• Translation of graphs to RDF, and partially from RDF.
Can be given as student project.

• Translation of graphs to KIF, and partially from KIF.
Can be given as student project.