Section: Application Domains

Introduction

We currently focus on two application domains: knowledge representation in agronomy, more precisely applied to the quality in agri-food chains, and metadata management, in particular for bibliographic metadata.

The application to agronomy has been initiated recently in our group. The choice of this application domain is motivated both by the local context 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 taking 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 biliographic metadata.