2009-12-03 Joint WP1-WP3 Phone Conference
AGENDA:
- Who is there
- Brainstorming session to discuss possible ways of integrating work in these two WPs
PARTICIPANTS:
Gaston Tagni (VUA), Barry Bishop (STI), Emanuele Della Valle (CEFRIEL), Yi Huang (Siemens), Volker Tresp (Siemens)
INTRODUCTION:
The purpose of this joint session between members of WP1 and WP3 is to bring the work of the two WPs closer with the aim of designing an improved operational framework for problem solving in LarKC, which the main goal of deliverable D1.2.2 "Improved Operational Framework". See work on D1.2.2 for more details.
In this deliverable we will attempt to map out the landscape for combining techniques from multiple disciplines for the purpose of achieving web scale reasoning. No easy task!.
The platform and plug-ins we have delivered so far are too coarse-grained as can be seen from the fact that we have mostly wrapped existing components. For the future we should be looking at exposing more fine-grained elements of plug-ins for re-use, i.e. individual functions, algorithms, data-structures, etc. For example, I could imagine a deductive reasoner replacing a sorted index with a cognitively inspired selection algorithm.
The main goal of this deliverable should be to identify as many potential situations where re-use of fine-grained elements is possible. These situations will be inspired by close consultation with the technical work packages 2, 3 and 4.
METHODOLOGY
We agreed that a good place to start would be with a survey of all LarKC personnel actively involved in plug-in creation. This will include WP 2,3,4 leaders, plus all people project-wide who write plug-ins or wrap existing components as plug-ins. We should ask them to list:
all potentially re-usable components (and sub-components) that their plug-ins do or could expose all missing functionality (e.g. from platform, data layer or missing utilities) that they would have liked to use/re-use People will need to be imaginative and should not limit themselves just to source code. Components for re-use could be anything from database structures and java classes, to 3rd party libraries and services.
CONCRETE DISCUSSION
Basically, the purpose of these dicussions is to get insights into the specific plug-ins being developed in each WP (WP2/3/4) and get a better understanding of the type of problems/tasks being solved/addressed by these plug-ins in order to see what features can be reused among plug-ins and what is the functionality that these plug-ins expect from the LarKC platform in order to achieve their goals. On the basis of these discussions we should be able to come up with a matrix of functionality/features for each plug-in and then integrate them into a coherent operational framework.
To make things more concrete, we would like to know which plug-ins are being developed in these WPs and for each of them things like:
- What is the functionality they provide?
- What is the specific task/problem being solved by the plug-in?
- How is the (selection/reasoning/transformation) problem (and the solution implemented by the plug-in) modeled?. This should help in learning common features among plug-ins that can be abstracted into the operational framework.
- What features/functions these plug-in expect/require from the platform? E.g. to be able to get feedback from the execution of other plug-ins or, to be able to invoke other plug-ins without the need to send a request to a decider plug-in.
- What other issues are relevant for each plug-in. E.g. trust, data privacy, etc.
MINUTES: