Section: Application Domains

Introduction

We currently focus on two application domains: agronomy, where knowledge representation is applied to the quality in agri-food chains, and bibliographic databases, in particular management of bibliographic metadata.

The choice of the agronomy domain is motivated both by the strong expertise of GraphIK (UMR IATE) and by its adequation to our research themes. Indeed, the agri-food domain seems to be particularly well-adapted to artificial intelligence techniques: there are no mathematical models available to solve the problems related to the quality of agrifood chains, which need to be stated at a more conceptual level; solving these problems requires an integrated approach that takes into account expert knowledge, which is typically symbolic, as well as numeric data, vague or uncertain information, multi-granularity knowledge, multiple and potentially conflicting viewpoints and actors.

The second area, metadata management, is not strictly speaking an application domain, but rather a cross-cutting axis. Indeed, metadata can be used to describe data in various areas (including for instance scientific publications in agronomy). We have a long experience in this domain, and we currently focus on document metadata.