Section: Overall Objectives

Logic and Graph-based KR

The main research domain of GraphIK is Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), which studies paradigms and formalisms for representing knowledge and reasoning on these representations. We follow a logic-oriented approach: the different kinds of knowledge have a logical semantics and reasoning mechanisms correspond to inferences in this logic.

However, we also use graphs and hypergraphs (in the graph-theoretic sense) as basic objects. Indeed, we view labelled graphs as an abstract representation of knowledge that can be expressed in many KR languages: different kinds of conceptual graphs —historically our main focus—, the Semantic Web language RDFS, expressive rules equivalent to so-called tuple-generating-dependencies in databases, some description logics dedicated to query answering, etc. For these languages, reasoning can be based on the structure of objects (thus on graph-theoretic notions) while being sound and complete with respect to entailment in the associated logical fragments. An important issue is to study trade-offs between the expressivity and computational tractability of (sound and complete) reasoning in these languages.