Supervisor

Suitable for

Abstract

The objective of this project would be for a student to implement a simple tableau-based reasoner for description logics. The project would involve the student designing the core data structures, implementing the basic algorithm, realising backtracking, and implementing various optimisations typically used in practical reasoners. The student could use a preexisting API (e.g., the OWL API) to load a description logic ontology, so they could just focus on solving the core problem. The student would be expected to evaluate their implementation on the ontologies from the repository that we’re maintaining in the KRR group (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/isg/ontologies/). The project seems to me to provide good opportunity for the student to demonstrate how well they absorbed the CS material (e.g., algorithms, data structures, computational complexity analysis, etc.) taught in our degrees. Also, the project is sufficiently open-ended so that the student can go quite a long way before running out of options of things to do. Having attended the KRR course would be a prerequisite for doing this project.